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Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans
- icebraining 9y agoA couple of links: "Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" by Stanislaw Lem: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm "Radical Detours - A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick", a master's thesis by Andrew Raba: http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10063/5348/thesis.pdf?sequence=1 http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1006...
- twic 9y agoAlthough speaking of Lem, at one point Dick thought he was “probably a composite committee rather than an individual”: http://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-a-communist-committee http://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-...
- jacobush 9y agoYet again, isn't Dicks' larger point that each and everyone of us are a composite committee to some degree?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Animats 9y agoNor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies. Oh? That's what legal marijuana legalization is for.
- alphonsegaston 9y agoThe opioid crisis is probably a more apt analogy, given its class dimensions and origination in the pharmaceutical industy. But see also corporate algorithms commodifying all social interaction into "followers" and "likes" as a way to reinforce hierarchy.
- cyberpunk0 9y agoNot a very accurate opinion you have but I guess you're entitled to it
- trophycase 9y agoWe definitely have but it definitely isn't from legalized marijuana.
- qwerty456127 9y agoMarijuana (as well as serotonergic psychedelics) generally makes people feel more united and similar in the positive sense, I don't know about any credible studies that would confirm this (although there probably are some) but I really doubt it can promote social hierarchization. Cocaine and alcohol, however, are known to stimulate aggressive-dominant behavior in individuals prone to it though cocaine will surely not stimulate obedience, it will stimulate people to resist propaganda/populism/nonsense and question more. The only well-known psychoactive substance that makes masses easier to manipulate is booze.
- pharrington 9y agoOn reading that quote, I immediately wondered if Farrell drank his coffee before going out to vote in the American presidential election. A less snidey thought is that humans always use various psychoactives for all kinds of social and asocial purposes.
- Endy 9y agoThank you. Finally there's someone else who sees this.
- jacobush 9y agoThat's what FB is for.
- totalperspectiv 9y agoAt those who scroll the comments first, this was well worth the ten minutes to read. I don't think I've wrapped my head around all the ideas enough to summarize it yet. But it really describes everything I love about the medium of scifi.
- zengid 9y agoThis is why I scroll the comments first!
- Eupolemos 9y agoI just wanted to second this - it is def. worth the short time to read. I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049 and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking. This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why you think he was worth reading. Either way, my time was well spent.
- madaxe_again 9y agoHis writing is generally awful, but his thoughts are (no qualification) the most profound I've ever encountered in print - and I've read quite a bit over the years. His short stories are also really worth-while, from his campy early stuff through to his later stuff - there's a vein of "what is reality" throughout, and they provide a relatively soft landing into his worlds.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoThe "Dick was a bad prose writer" meme is fairly undeserved, in my opinion. He was, if anything, quite inconsistent in that regard, and also capable of fantastically good, searing prose at times. The almost theatrically pulpy Ubik, for example, contains something of his finest writing (unlike much of what he wrote, it nails a certain unnerving combination of slapstick drollness and outright creepiness). Sure, some of his prose is a bit creaky, exposing his pulp roots, but not consistently so. His writing matured once he slowed down in the late 1960s, and Flow My Tears and A Scanner Darkly both contain some damn fine writing. His essays, lectures, letters and the Exegesis also showed him to be a very good writer.
- madaxe_again 9y agoThe Empire Never Ended, in a nutshell, to lift PKD's final gnosis. His view was that we live in the vestiges of the Roman Empire, and I'm inclined to agree - we live in a gestalt system that receives its symbol-set from the earliest empire builders, and we are mostly oblivious to our inherited reality. We just accept it. Reality is a fungible concept, as he describes - you can exchange one fixed set of givens for another without changing basic reality one jot, but such can drastically alter perceived reality. PKD would argue that the President of the United States is not real - that the United States is not real - that there is no quantifiable "UnitedStatesness" about the latter and that the former is only so because we define him as so, and therefore, neither actually exist. We just collectively agree they do. His prime argument always arced back to that which so appealed to Baudrillard - that we have exchange the real for symbols of the real, that we have exchanged reality for a representation of reality - a map so perfect that it is indistinguishable from that it describes - yet all of our actions are constrained to the map, not to actual reality. Today, we disappear farther and farther up our own reality-hole, as we entrain and develop systems to further codify and divorce reality from itself - e.g. computers and the internet - the more we represent and perceive the representation as real, the less the real pertains to the reality we perceive. It's really hard to break out, but not impossible - but you have to see the Black Iron Prison first through gnosis, and it's then purely a mental process. Reading list: PKD's entire corpus - his non-SF novels ply the same waters - but the novels listed in the article are a good starting point. VALIS is where you go once you're prepared to have your mind melted and reformed. Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra Vonnegut's Galapagos Anyway. Time for me to go stare at the pink laser beam.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y agoValis is great, but in terms of general atmosphere and the final (or not so final) revelation Ubik is definitely a better choice, in spite of a spoiler in the article.
- Bucephalus355 9y agoSeconding Baudrillard. His analysis of hyperreality, and how we respond to hyperreality, even though it doesn’t really exist and has no effect on reality (which it is imitating) is really tragic.
- dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago> Yet the door to Joe’s apartment—which argues with him and refuses to open because he has not paid it the obligatory tip—sounds ominously plausible. Someone, somewhere, is pitching this as a viable business plan to Y Combinator or the venture capitalists in Menlo Park. And that's the sad reality. When we look at what the Internet has become, who did it that way - it's us, developers working for small and large companies, driven by profit, and willing sacrifice a thing or two on the way. And, there is no way back.
- westoncb 9y agoTL;DR — Phillip K. Dick's writing anticipated fake news. :P Alright, that's too much of a simplification, and the article is worth a read—but I'd warn that it's plagued by the annoying (and all too common) use of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory' or other more appropriate options, which magically makes all kinds of statements sound more interesting than they really are. > ... Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” Now imagine if instead it were simply said that, "the media, governments, big corporations, religious groups, and political groups attempt to conceal the truth and tell their own versions instead." The term 'reality' is kind of useful because 'creating a reality' isn't quite a simple as telling a lie, since it's more like a network of lies used to present an alternate account of the state of things. But, it also carries with it the implication that there isn't any objective reality, and that when a political group 'creates a new reality', that it is somehow ontologically equivalent to any other 'reality' available. I know this is kind of a side rant, but seriously, I can't wait for the day when it's no longer socially acceptable to talk about 'constructing reality' in random contexts, whether the reader is aware of its particular meaning (it's jargon from Sociology and spread to other areas) or not. I can just imagine how it would have felt to read the article if I didn't happen to know the origin of that phrase ('social construction of reality')—it would seem mostly coherent and would appear to be talking about something of the utmost significance, and yet with some kind of vagueness I couldn't quite place (that's my recollection of running into it years ago).
- empath75 9y agoYou seem very sure that reality has a precise definition that everyone agrees on.
- westoncb 9y agoNo, actually, my complaint is that mid 20th century a bunch of people introduced a new definition for it, so clearly not everyone agrees :) Before that, however, the situation was much more clear cut. And even still, 'reality' is mostly just used in the traditional way. For instance, the American Heritage dictionary's entry: n. The quality or state of being actual or true. n. One, such as a person, an entity, or an event, that is actual: "the weight of history and political realities” ( Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.) n. The totality of all things possessing actuality, existence, or essence. n. That which exists objectively and in fact: Your observations do not seem to be about reality. idiom in reality In fact; actually. Now, if we jump to something like Wiktionary: n. The state of being actual or real. n. A real entity, event or other fact. n. The entirety of all that is real. n. An individual observer's own subjective perception of that which is real. —we can at least find one entry which match's the article's usage (the last one there). My problem with it is that redefining 'reality' to mean nearly the opposite of what it traditionally has meant is an underhanded way of pushing the philosophical viewpoint that no objective reality exists (which was held by the people who introduced this usage of the word).
- zengid 9y agoDystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. Yeah, I greatly admire works that can show a diverse ecology instead of trying to say that an entire world is controlled by a single entity. It just feels stale. Kim Stanley Robinson (who wrote his PHD thesis on Dick's works [0]) is really good at building an ecology of interesting elements that interact and create complexity. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Philip-Studies-Speculative-Fiction/dp/0835720144 https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Philip-Studies-Speculative-Fic...
- edanm 9y agoAny recommendation of where to start with his books?
- lobster_johnson 9y agoSpeaking of, I was quite disappointed with the new "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" show, now on Amazon. They are decidedly not faithful to the short stories they're based on, and in several cases choose a conclusion that is diametrically opposite to what PKD intended. In "Impossible Planet" they go for a weirdly romantic ending that is the opposite of the story, and turns it into some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy. "Autofac" starts great, but then introduces a twist that makes no sense. Dick's story is extremely dark (taking the automatic, unstoppable factory idea to its logical next step), and the final ending essentially makes the whole premise pointless, turning a smart comment on runaway consumerism and automation into a cheap thriller about love conquering all. Film adaptations have generally been unable to make something faithful to PKD. I just wish someone would have the balls to do it, because it could be fantastic.
- jandrese 9y agoSee, I had a very different reading of the end of the Impossible Planet. The old lady and the guy died but in their dying brains they finally "went to Earth", the imperfectly remembered yet angelic place of her rose tinted memories. The one I didn't like was the one where the smartphone helpdesk gaslights the teenager. I'm willing to suspend disbelief a bit that the teenager won't recognise what's happening, but the end didn't work. She should have died! Every day that she's alive is another day where she might talk about her experience and have someone else go "Wait, that doesn't make sense..." Instead she's doing presentations and inviting people to hear her story! My only minor quibble is that the ending is a little too easy to guess on most of them. The Lesbian Space Cop/Distraught CEO episode was the best for this, it kept you guessing for a right long time.
- madaxe_again 9y agoYeah, but in the short story the dead planet actually was earth - ends with him finding a copper disk and going “e pluribus unum? What does that mean?” before throwing it away and getting back on ship. Very definitely not the same as the garbage TV series. I recommend reading the short stories - the series absolutely lost the meaning of every single one of them.
- qualitytime 9y ago"In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia." Reminds me of the recent Hawaii false missile alert.
- drawkbox 9y ago> the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. People love a good story and Philip K. Dick knows this well, he writes stories to convey these thoughts through fake realities. Entertaining stories, movies, narratives and 'fake news' essentially, simplifies the world into a good/bad structure and let's you in on the good side. People love a tub of confirmation bias to bask in. It is the same situation as to why good news doesn't end up on the nightly news. Good news can make people feel worse. Watch HGTV for a while then look at your house and you can't help but feel less than, same with too much good news. People like a story, stories sell, facts and the entropy of existentialism is too much for some people all the time or many. Same reason religion exists, it is a simplification that allows people to be 'good' and frees up mindspace to think about less jarring things. Whether the story is lying and fake or entertainment, people like it because life can take you into areas that are reality which is messy and sometimes completely out of your control, a good story is a gift. America and the world, could also be going through a Hypernormalisation moment. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation