WEBVTT - When We Were Cyber 0:00:15.170 --> 0:00:23.970 Pushkin. Once upon a time, I was depressed, so I 0:00:24.050 --> 0:00:31.290 decided to become a philosopher. I was in my early twenties, 0:00:31.450 --> 0:00:34.050 and what I really wanted to be was a novelist. 0:00:36.330 --> 0:00:39.490 I'd spent a couple of years very broke in London, 0:00:40.250 --> 0:00:44.610 doing various gig economy jobs and lugging my record collection 0:00:44.850 --> 0:00:49.810 in and out of a series of shared houses. During 0:00:49.810 --> 0:00:53.210 this time, I'd written a hundred thousand words of cutting 0:00:53.290 --> 0:00:57.490 edge experimental fiction which no one wanted to publish or 0:00:57.530 --> 0:01:02.050 even read. I needed something radical to happen. I needed 0:01:02.330 --> 0:01:08.370 a future. My solution was to enroll in a master's 0:01:08.450 --> 0:01:13.570 program Warwick University, just outside the English city of Coventry. 0:01:15.290 --> 0:01:18.490 My plan was, well, I don't really remember what my 0:01:18.570 --> 0:01:22.850 plan was exactly. Read some books stored out my head. 0:01:24.570 --> 0:01:29.450 On the fourteenth November nineteen forty it became a city 0:01:29.450 --> 0:01:32.490 of destruction. The thing you need to know about Coventry 0:01:32.570 --> 0:01:34.610 is that the way it looks owes a lot to 0:01:34.650 --> 0:01:38.330 the Nazi Luftfaffa. They bombed it more or less flat 0:01:38.370 --> 0:01:40.970 in World War Two. The little town that grew into 0:01:40.970 --> 0:01:44.250 a famous place of guilds and crafts and medieval ceremony 0:01:44.970 --> 0:01:49.090 into a rich trade town into a great center of industry, 0:01:49.770 --> 0:01:55.170 into a burned, bombed city. Coventry was reimagined by city planners. 0:01:55.810 --> 0:02:01.210 It didn't die, who wanted a rational modernist machine for living, 0:02:01.930 --> 0:02:04.850 but ended up with the city center dominated by an 0:02:04.850 --> 0:02:10.250 elevated concrete ring road jammed with cars. Coventry had taken 0:02:10.290 --> 0:02:13.650 an economic battering during the Thatchy years. You get what 0:02:13.690 --> 0:02:17.770 I'm saying. It was not a glamorous place. The most 0:02:17.770 --> 0:02:20.970 famous cultural product of Coventry was the band The Specials, 0:02:21.490 --> 0:02:32.970 who wrote a song about it called ghost Town. All 0:02:33.050 --> 0:02:39.090 the clubs being closed down, my record collection and I 0:02:39.210 --> 0:02:42.890 moved to this ghost town in nineteen ninety three. I 0:02:42.970 --> 0:02:45.490 was innocent enough to believe that philosophy would be a 0:02:45.530 --> 0:02:49.850 noble pursuit. I pictured a group of serious people trying 0:02:49.890 --> 0:02:53.770 to find the truth, possibly wearing robes. What I found 0:02:53.810 --> 0:02:57.570 instead was a state of war, and soon I was 0:02:57.610 --> 0:03:05.610 in the trenches with the rest of them. This is 0:03:05.690 --> 0:03:10.570 Into the Zone, a podcast about opposite and how borders 0:03:10.610 --> 0:03:15.250 are never as clear as we think. I'm Harry Kunzru. 0:03:16.170 --> 0:03:21.730 This episode is about the present and the future. It's 0:03:21.730 --> 0:03:29.210 about minds and bodies. It's about biology and machines. It's 0:03:29.250 --> 0:03:34.130 about a time long long ago, when we were cyber 0:03:38.650 --> 0:03:42.890 in my new country home. I found bitter personal rivalries 0:03:43.090 --> 0:03:45.770 and dreams of well paid jobs on the other side 0:03:45.810 --> 0:03:49.170 of the Atlantic, and there was a culture war at 0:03:49.250 --> 0:03:51.570 least as bitter as the red and blue of the 0:03:51.650 --> 0:03:59.210 Trump era. On one side were the analytic philosophers, who 0:03:59.250 --> 0:04:03.970 felt that thinking ought to be rigorous and logical. To them, 0:04:04.010 --> 0:04:07.290 the main job of philosophy was to distinguish between truth 0:04:07.450 --> 0:04:12.370 and falsehood. Wrote books with a lot of quasi mathematical notation, 0:04:12.930 --> 0:04:16.810 and thought of themselves as logical traffic cops, saying which 0:04:16.850 --> 0:04:20.410 concepts could go ahead and which had to stop at 0:04:20.450 --> 0:04:26.250 the red lights. On the other side were the followers 0:04:26.250 --> 0:04:32.330 of Jacques Derrida, French god of deconstruction. The deconstructionists had 0:04:32.370 --> 0:04:36.370 come over long years in the university bar to suspect 0:04:36.410 --> 0:04:38.890 that the only reality was in the words of the 0:04:38.890 --> 0:04:43.570 philosophy books they read. There was nothing outside the text. 0:04:44.530 --> 0:04:48.490 These philosophers were poetic and melancholy as far as I 0:04:48.530 --> 0:04:50.690 could see. Their ultimate aim in life was to write 0:04:50.810 --> 0:04:53.530 essays that sounded as if they'd been badly translated out 0:04:53.530 --> 0:04:58.970 of French. Both groups of philosophers were, in their own ways, 0:04:59.410 --> 0:05:04.850 unutterably tedious. Luckily for me, there was a third group 0:05:04.930 --> 0:05:09.530 in the department. They liked a lot of the same 0:05:09.570 --> 0:05:13.610 things I did, including things that weren't philosophy at all, 0:05:14.810 --> 0:05:19.250 things such as science fiction, movies featuring people turning into machines, 0:05:20.290 --> 0:05:26.890 fractal patterns, techno music, mind altering drugs, experimental fiction, and 0:05:27.010 --> 0:05:32.570 above all, a new thing called the Internet. When I 0:05:32.690 --> 0:05:36.250 arrived at Warwick, there were only about one hundred and 0:05:36.370 --> 0:05:41.930 thirty websites. Have a think about that. Today they're around 0:05:41.970 --> 0:05:46.490 one point six billion. I got online using a modem 0:05:46.570 --> 0:05:52.490 that made a sound like a sick transistor radio. After 0:05:52.530 --> 0:05:55.010 this thing spent a while strangling itself, I might click 0:05:55.050 --> 0:05:57.530 a link. Then I could usually go and make a 0:05:57.530 --> 0:06:00.290 cup of tea while it loaded. But I didn't care. 0:06:00.770 --> 0:06:04.090 The Internet was amazing. It connected me to a whole 0:06:04.170 --> 0:06:07.930 new world of subcultural weirdness. Instantly. I could talk to 0:06:08.010 --> 0:06:11.730 witches and new foccultists and make out with people pretending 0:06:11.730 --> 0:06:14.090 to be unicorns in the text based hot tub of 0:06:14.090 --> 0:06:21.850 a multi user domain. It was way better than coventry. 0:06:24.170 --> 0:06:28.610 This was cyberspace. That's what we called it. The word 0:06:28.650 --> 0:06:33.010 seems quaint now, conjuring up graphics of kids literally surfing 0:06:33.050 --> 0:06:38.930 the pixelated waves on PC keyboards. Mostly cyberspace existed in 0:06:38.930 --> 0:06:43.810 our dreams, and those dreams were largely formed by the 0:06:43.890 --> 0:06:47.730 writer William Gibson. I had that feeling of, you know, 0:06:48.050 --> 0:06:52.410 that post geographical feeling. This is him in a documentary 0:06:52.450 --> 0:06:56.090 made in two thousand called No Maps for These Territories. 0:06:56.610 --> 0:07:01.090 I think we've been growing a sort of prosthetic, extended 0:07:02.570 --> 0:07:08.170 nervous system for the last hundred years or so, and 0:07:08.410 --> 0:07:13.370 it's really starting to take William Gibson's nineteen eighty four 0:07:13.450 --> 0:07:18.290 book Neuromancer has the famous opening line, the sky above 0:07:18.330 --> 0:07:21.090 the port was the color of television tuned to a 0:07:21.170 --> 0:07:24.930 dead channel. It was more than a science fiction novel. 0:07:25.370 --> 0:07:29.690 It felt uncanny, like a prophecy of the future. It's 0:07:29.730 --> 0:07:32.810 the story of a hacker traveling through the Matrix, a 0:07:32.890 --> 0:07:36.610 global internet that manifests as a kind of virtual reality. 0:07:37.570 --> 0:07:41.970 Somewhere in the matrix, a sophisticated AI has become conscious. 0:07:42.570 --> 0:07:45.690 There's a lot of flying through imaginary cityscapes of Neon 0:07:45.930 --> 0:07:51.650 and Matt black Towers. Neuromancer posed questions that were very 0:07:51.730 --> 0:07:56.250 interesting to me. About how humans were becoming connected to machines, 0:07:56.770 --> 0:08:01.050 how we were linking ourselves together into networks, how machines 0:08:01.050 --> 0:08:09.610 were becoming intelligent and bodies were melting into data. Many 0:08:09.650 --> 0:08:13.010 of the grad students in my philosophy department were obsessed 0:08:13.090 --> 0:08:17.370 with those same questions, and they did what grad students 0:08:17.410 --> 0:08:21.130 everywhere do. They organized a conference to talk about it. 0:08:22.090 --> 0:08:26.170 They called it Virtual futures. All of a sudden, the 0:08:26.170 --> 0:08:31.250 body finds itself in an amidst extraterrestrial space. The body 0:08:32.170 --> 0:08:37.490 cannot come. The title virtual Futures referred to William Gibson's 0:08:37.490 --> 0:08:42.370 short story The Gernsback Continuum. The Gernsback Continuum is about 0:08:42.410 --> 0:08:46.570 an architectural photographer who's hired to take pictures of futuristic 0:08:46.650 --> 0:08:51.410 nineteen thirties buildings think chrome and fins and curving concrete. 0:08:52.050 --> 0:08:55.450 As he shooting pictures of these decaying old buildings, he 0:08:55.570 --> 0:08:59.050 starts to see things to hallucinate people from the future. 0:08:59.930 --> 0:09:03.290 Not his own future, but the future that people imagined 0:09:03.290 --> 0:09:06.250 when those buildings were new, one with ray guns and 0:09:06.410 --> 0:09:11.970 flying cars and food pills. We imagine futures that never 0:09:12.010 --> 0:09:17.170 come to pass, imaginary futures that stay as kind of ghosts. 0:09:17.730 --> 0:09:24.570 They're not our actual future. They are virtual futures. A 0:09:24.690 --> 0:09:28.890 quarter century later, I'm living in a future that contains 0:09:29.050 --> 0:09:32.570 some of the things I imagined, and plenty more I didn't. 0:09:33.570 --> 0:09:37.530 The future we imagined back in the nineteen nineties now 0:09:37.570 --> 0:09:44.810 seems unbelievably far away. Recently, I was going through some 0:09:44.850 --> 0:09:47.650 old stuff and found one of the flyers for the 0:09:47.730 --> 0:09:52.050 Virtual Futures Conferences. It's hard to say what's going on 0:09:52.250 --> 0:09:56.410 exactly because it's really badly photocopied, but I think there's 0:09:56.450 --> 0:10:01.730 some kind of hybrid human insect machine sex happening. The 0:10:01.850 --> 0:10:08.490 description just says philosophical conference papers have titles like Meltdown, 0:10:09.130 --> 0:10:13.890 viewed to Immersion, cyber Apocalypse now, and if you weren't 0:10:13.890 --> 0:10:20.690 getting the message, apocalyptics, Cybernetics. The Virtual Futures Conferences. Eventually 0:10:20.730 --> 0:10:23.370 there were three, and I went to them. All connected 0:10:23.370 --> 0:10:25.690 me to people who are still some of my best friends. 0:10:26.650 --> 0:10:32.290 They changed my life, and it wasn't just me. I 0:10:32.370 --> 0:10:37.290 was very aware in medicine that the body was being 0:10:37.890 --> 0:10:42.290 increasingly observed through machines and that you could see deeper 0:10:42.330 --> 0:10:46.050 beneath the skin than ever before, and actually it was 0:10:46.130 --> 0:10:51.570 creating a crisis. Rachel Armstrong was a discontented junior doctor 0:10:52.050 --> 0:10:54.370 that the people that we saw in the ward were 0:10:54.410 --> 0:11:00.450 being abstracted into data. Each space was based on the boy. 0:11:00.730 --> 0:11:03.690 Rachel thought she was going to a computer conference. She 0:11:03.770 --> 0:11:05.930 hoped it would help her be a better doctor. I 0:11:06.010 --> 0:11:10.090 got way more than I bargained for body space back 0:11:10.130 --> 0:11:12.770 to the body. That was the first time I'd come 0:11:12.810 --> 0:11:18.570 across those extreme ideas and the most incredible performances. A 0:11:18.650 --> 0:11:24.290 woman with blue hair from underneath the table, with this 0:11:24.490 --> 0:11:31.690 cyberbabble and techno music. It was speaking to me, but 0:11:31.930 --> 0:11:34.890 I didn't know what it was. I think the best 0:11:34.930 --> 0:11:38.610 way I would describe it was punk. There's a saying 0:11:38.610 --> 0:11:41.890 about a sex Pistols gig in Manchester in nineteen seventy 0:11:41.890 --> 0:11:46.210 six that everyone who was there started a band. That's 0:11:46.210 --> 0:11:49.810 how it was with Virtual Futures. People who were there 0:11:49.930 --> 0:11:55.930 started art collectives and record labels and magazines. They became architects, 0:11:56.250 --> 0:12:00.570 musicians and filmmakers. But at the time it seemed marginal 0:12:00.890 --> 0:12:04.410 and if I'm honest, also a bit ridiculous. But then 0:12:04.490 --> 0:12:08.170 that feeling of ridiculousness is sometimes how you feel in 0:12:08.210 --> 0:12:12.890 the presence of some thing genuinely new. The audacity was 0:12:13.090 --> 0:12:15.730 in a way the best thing about it. I mean, 0:12:15.770 --> 0:12:19.810 this was a really industrial carpet setting, with kind of 0:12:19.930 --> 0:12:26.930 cheap furniture and very rudimentary technologies. Bizarrely, there we were 0:12:27.650 --> 0:12:30.890 on a windswept university campus at the edge of an 0:12:30.970 --> 0:12:35.010 unfashionable town in a country known for the past, not 0:12:35.050 --> 0:12:40.010 the future. Virtual futures was a way of refusing all 0:12:40.010 --> 0:12:44.810 that of claiming the future. And the most viscerally futuristic 0:12:44.850 --> 0:12:59.570 thing in my life was music that's hyperon experience. Two 0:12:59.650 --> 0:13:02.610 guys from the County of Suffolk who made underground dance 0:13:02.730 --> 0:13:06.730 music we called this kind of music hardcore or jungle. 0:13:07.330 --> 0:13:09.490 It was a style that came out of the rave scene. 0:13:10.170 --> 0:13:13.530 It was diy music made in bedrooms with cheap equipment. 0:13:14.330 --> 0:13:16.890 You can hear that it's built around drum brakes from 0:13:16.890 --> 0:13:34.370 old funk records. In jungle, the breaks are sped up 0:13:34.490 --> 0:13:40.650 beyond the capabilities of any human drummer. Acceleration was the 0:13:40.730 --> 0:13:46.450 key to everything. The world seemed to be getting faster, 0:13:46.810 --> 0:13:50.890 the future rushing towards us, and this music sounded like 0:13:50.930 --> 0:13:57.730 it was breaking free of human limits. It was an 0:13:57.730 --> 0:14:00.330 example of the thing we thought we saw all around 0:14:00.450 --> 0:14:05.050 us that the human present was heading towards something totally new, 0:14:05.450 --> 0:14:08.930 a time when human beings maybe wouldn't even exist anymore. 0:14:09.850 --> 0:14:14.530 The post human. That's a word like cyberspace or the 0:14:14.570 --> 0:14:19.850 phrase information super Highway. That seems very nineties now, along 0:14:19.850 --> 0:14:25.010 with the excessive quoting of William Gibson's writing, Fragments of 0:14:25.170 --> 0:14:29.850 Music from the Countless Speakers, Smells of three Monomers, Paddies 0:14:29.890 --> 0:14:34.490 of prime firl. I remember one presentation at Virtual Futures 0:14:34.530 --> 0:14:37.450 that took place in a darkened room where two young 0:14:37.490 --> 0:14:40.930 men in black fatigues pointed a strobe light at the audience, 0:14:41.250 --> 0:14:44.650 set very slow, so we were basically blinded about once 0:14:44.650 --> 0:14:47.610 a second by a super bright light while they played 0:14:47.810 --> 0:14:50.930 very fast industrial music and shouted at us about the 0:14:50.970 --> 0:14:59.050 imminent dissolution of our bodies. The thing that made it 0:14:59.130 --> 0:15:04.250 hilarious was that we were all sitting down one uncomfortable 0:15:04.290 --> 0:15:16.730 plastic chairs in a lecture hall. Headlining Virtual Futures that 0:15:16.850 --> 0:15:20.090 first year was a character who looked like he'd stepped 0:15:20.090 --> 0:15:23.410 out of Neuromancer. He too was dressed all in black, 0:15:23.970 --> 0:15:28.770 black leather jacket, dark glasses, black hair tied in a ponytail, 0:15:29.810 --> 0:15:34.970 his name was Manuel Dalanda. Manuel is a philosopher, but 0:15:35.130 --> 0:15:39.890 exactly the kind of philosopher we loved, an outsider, a maverick, 0:15:40.370 --> 0:15:43.490 a philosopher who connects philosophy to loads of other cool 0:15:43.530 --> 0:15:49.410 stuff in chemistry and history and social theory. Recently I 0:15:49.490 --> 0:15:52.130 tracked him down and I got to talk to him 0:15:52.170 --> 0:15:56.090 at his home in Manhattan. He lives alone in an 0:15:56.130 --> 0:15:59.130 apartment in a pre war building near Grand Central Station. 0:15:59.810 --> 0:16:04.130 His place is, like him, very focused, kind of monkish. 0:16:04.610 --> 0:16:07.530 I got my films into the Widney Biennial and so on, 0:16:07.770 --> 0:16:11.490 so everything was guying Joe's joy. Realized that filmmakers are 0:16:11.530 --> 0:16:15.810 the proletariat of the art world in New York, and 0:16:16.050 --> 0:16:20.690 I hated that Manuel grew up in Mexico. In the 0:16:20.770 --> 0:16:24.130 late seventies and eighties, he was part of the legendary 0:16:24.290 --> 0:16:28.210 New York downtown scene. He made super eight films that 0:16:28.250 --> 0:16:32.570 combined street footage with hand drawn special effects and found 0:16:32.570 --> 0:16:37.290 images from pawn and war movies. With his friend Joe Coleman, 0:16:37.810 --> 0:16:43.890 he staged some abrasive and confrontational performances for Manuel. Going 0:16:43.930 --> 0:16:49.290 too Far wasn't far enough. When the highbrow theoretical publisher 0:16:49.370 --> 0:16:52.850 Simia Texts brought the famous French philosopher Gille de Leurs 0:16:52.930 --> 0:16:56.730 to town. They invited Manuel and Joe to perform something 0:16:57.090 --> 0:17:02.250 radical in air quotes, something that would feel transgressive. Manuel 0:17:02.290 --> 0:17:05.410 and Joe decided to visit the seven plagues of Egypt 0:17:05.450 --> 0:17:08.810 on the audience, and we attacked it with everything we had, 0:17:09.090 --> 0:17:12.090 and we had freshly the capitated house head and a 0:17:12.210 --> 0:17:17.930 pig's head. We had live animals of all the different plagues, snakes, rats, 0:17:17.930 --> 0:17:23.410 crickets to stand for locusts and toads. Joe had his 0:17:23.570 --> 0:17:30.610 gear for exploding, and he just was just complete chaos, Yeah, exploding. 0:17:31.690 --> 0:17:35.170 One of Joe Coleman's party tricks was to attach explosive 0:17:35.210 --> 0:17:38.490 to himself and set them off. If you want, you 0:17:38.530 --> 0:17:40.570 can find a video on the Internet of one of 0:17:40.650 --> 0:17:44.850 Joe Coleman's performances. It's kind of messed up. He's wearing 0:17:44.890 --> 0:17:47.450 a suit with what looks to me like a sheep's 0:17:47.490 --> 0:17:50.570 head hung around his neck. He seems like he's playing 0:17:50.610 --> 0:17:54.250 a character, yelling at the audience like a preacher. He 0:17:54.370 --> 0:17:57.290 bites the heads off some live mice, then takes a 0:17:57.330 --> 0:17:59.890 cigarette lighter to a fuse sticking out of the front 0:17:59.890 --> 0:18:10.010 of his shirt. People are screaming, scram laying to the exits. 0:18:16.730 --> 0:18:19.890 By the time I met Manuel Dalanda at Virtual Futures 0:18:19.890 --> 0:18:23.050 in nineteen ninety four, he'd stopped blowing things up with 0:18:23.130 --> 0:18:27.650 Joe Coleman and started writing books. Philosophy books are supposed 0:18:27.690 --> 0:18:31.890 to have abstract titles, preferably connecting two important words, like 0:18:32.850 --> 0:18:38.730 being and time or reasons and persons. Manuel's book was 0:18:38.770 --> 0:18:45.690 called War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. In it, 0:18:45.850 --> 0:18:49.850 he imagined a robot historian looking back at the evolution 0:18:49.890 --> 0:18:53.570 of his species. He told a science fiction story about 0:18:53.610 --> 0:18:57.970 machines using humans as their reproductive organs until they could 0:18:58.010 --> 0:19:01.890 develop the capability to copy themselves. It was a way 0:19:01.890 --> 0:19:05.290 to talk about his idea of non organic life and 0:19:05.370 --> 0:19:10.170 to approach many technical problems in philosophy. But importantly, it 0:19:10.250 --> 0:19:13.210 was also cool. It was a vision of the future 0:19:13.250 --> 0:19:16.610 that spoke to us directly. As we dance to jungle 0:19:16.650 --> 0:19:20.330 and experimented with connecting ourselves together via the Internet. We 0:19:20.490 --> 0:19:23.490 felt as if we were half machine already, that we 0:19:23.530 --> 0:19:32.530 were cyborgs, cybernetic organisms. Speaking with Manuel plunges me right 0:19:32.570 --> 0:19:35.610 back to all the things that entranced us about his work. 0:19:36.410 --> 0:19:41.090 He combines a love of chaos with a ruthlessly analytical mind. 0:19:43.130 --> 0:19:44.650 One of the first things that I did when I 0:19:44.650 --> 0:19:49.210 came to New York was to trip an acid multiple times. 0:19:49.210 --> 0:19:51.610 I mean we're talking about two hundred times problem in 0:19:51.610 --> 0:19:54.850 about four years, at the same time studying analytical philosophy. 0:19:54.890 --> 0:19:57.050 And that became even more so when I bought my 0:19:57.090 --> 0:20:00.890 first computer in nineteen eighty, a huge industrial computer. Once 0:20:00.930 --> 0:20:03.730 you get into computers, once you start programming computers, you 0:20:03.810 --> 0:20:08.010 understand analytical philosophy much more because all computer languages are 0:20:08.050 --> 0:20:12.130 basically derived the logic systems that bertrand Russell and Frega 0:20:12.170 --> 0:20:15.250 and so I created. So you're programming and you're really 0:20:15.330 --> 0:20:17.890 dealing with the stuff these guys are dealing with. So 0:20:17.930 --> 0:20:21.730 I was into analytical philosophy, but acid, which I continue 0:20:21.770 --> 0:20:24.250 to take, and I continued victor this day four times 0:20:24.250 --> 0:20:28.050 a year, artificial intelligence and robotics. Although that is one 0:20:28.090 --> 0:20:31.770 way of crossing the threshold, you know, giving metal, so 0:20:31.930 --> 0:20:35.250 to speak, consciousness. I also had in mind things like 0:20:35.970 --> 0:20:40.250 the atmosphere of planet Earth. In the atmosphere of planet Earth, 0:20:40.290 --> 0:20:44.570 the seas and the river's clause, the atmosphere, you have 0:20:44.650 --> 0:20:48.570 all kinds of creatures that emerges spontaneously. Some of them 0:20:48.610 --> 0:20:51.770 we name hurricanes because they last long enough and they 0:20:51.810 --> 0:20:54.010 have enough energy to causals damage that we need to 0:20:54.090 --> 0:20:57.330 name them Hurricane Katrina in bar Urricane Nancy. But then 0:20:57.370 --> 0:21:02.850 there are thunderstorms. Thunderstorms are incredible sculptures, incredible machines made 0:21:02.850 --> 0:21:07.410 out of clouds with thunder and lightning inside, and they move, 0:21:07.490 --> 0:21:09.570 and at any one point in time, the seven or 0:21:09.570 --> 0:21:13.330 eight thunderstorms on the planet, there's always some of them 0:21:13.410 --> 0:21:17.370 dancing around. They give birth literally to tornadoes. When I 0:21:17.370 --> 0:21:21.370 think of a thunderstorm filled with energy and lightning and 0:21:21.530 --> 0:21:25.170 giving birth to tornadoes, it's very hard for me not 0:21:25.250 --> 0:21:27.450 to think about it as a kind of product all 0:21:27.650 --> 0:21:32.050 life self organization, even in the matter when you begin 0:21:32.090 --> 0:21:35.490 to realize that, in addition to DNA and proteins that 0:21:35.890 --> 0:21:39.330 these things don't have, that we share those processes of 0:21:39.370 --> 0:21:42.330 self organization with them, and that life would have never 0:21:42.370 --> 0:21:44.530 been able to take off in this planet had it 0:21:44.610 --> 0:21:49.090 not been for those previously existing processes organization, do you 0:21:49.170 --> 0:21:51.850 begin to question the difference between the living and then 0:21:51.930 --> 0:21:55.410 on living. I mean, the really kind of trippy thing 0:21:55.810 --> 0:21:59.210 about worry. The age of intelligent machines is asking the 0:21:59.290 --> 0:22:03.210 questions about what does happen when not just any old machines, 0:22:03.250 --> 0:22:06.850 but machines of war develop a kind of autonomy. I mean, 0:22:06.850 --> 0:22:09.930 we're familiar with that in popular culture. We think of Terminator, 0:22:10.090 --> 0:22:12.930 we think of the war of the machines against the people. 0:22:12.930 --> 0:22:17.210 It gets into a very apocalyptic way of thinking very quickly, 0:22:17.370 --> 0:22:21.650 what did you want to focus on war? Well, because 0:22:22.050 --> 0:22:25.490 as a materialist, as someone who really took seriously the 0:22:25.570 --> 0:22:29.890 idea that there's material culture in addition to symbolic culture, 0:22:29.930 --> 0:22:35.130 the material culture of blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, electricians, and someone 0:22:35.170 --> 0:22:38.930 who philosophers never think about. Then I began to think, well, 0:22:38.970 --> 0:22:42.730 who creates those weapons of war? And then the battlefield 0:22:42.770 --> 0:22:46.930 itself is a social space because chimpanzees don't fight wars. 0:22:46.970 --> 0:22:51.330 They raid each other's tribes and communities, but they don't 0:22:51.330 --> 0:22:54.770 really fight war. So war is a exclusively social and 0:22:54.850 --> 0:22:58.490 human phenomenon. Yes, beliefs and symbolic ideas about God and 0:22:58.530 --> 0:23:01.410 about patriotism do make you fight, or once you enter 0:23:01.490 --> 0:23:05.210 the battlefield and you begin confronting those flying metallic projectiles 0:23:05.250 --> 0:23:09.370 and shock waves, close fire and bodies maimed and killed 0:23:09.370 --> 0:23:12.570 and destroyed. It is all material. It is perhaps the 0:23:12.770 --> 0:23:16.530 most material space, the one in which you cannot possibly 0:23:16.570 --> 0:23:18.930 deny that there's a world that exists in the apparently 0:23:18.930 --> 0:23:23.530 of our minds, because it's constantly affecting you. Ma'muel de 0:23:23.650 --> 0:23:28.170 Lande's mind is its own planet. He amazes me as 0:23:28.250 --> 0:23:30.850 much now as he did when I first encountered him 0:23:30.850 --> 0:23:34.730 a quarter century ago. Many philosophers seem to think the 0:23:34.770 --> 0:23:39.210 world outside the mind, it's almost impossibly far away, something 0:23:39.290 --> 0:23:42.650 for someone else to deal with. But that's not Manuel, 0:23:43.850 --> 0:23:46.650 and I don't believe that our senses give us access 0:23:46.690 --> 0:23:49.650 to the world as it is. Psychophysicists have shown for 0:23:49.650 --> 0:23:53.570 a long time we see only part of the electromagnetic spectrum, 0:23:53.770 --> 0:23:57.370 the visible part. We hear only part of the audio spectrum. 0:23:57.530 --> 0:24:00.210 If something is too fast, like a bullet striking you're 0:24:00.210 --> 0:24:02.610 in the head, we cannot really see the bullet. Something 0:24:02.690 --> 0:24:06.050 is too slow, like a rat decomposing, we don't see that. 0:24:06.370 --> 0:24:10.410 We only see windows into the world had because we 0:24:10.610 --> 0:24:15.130 intervene in the world to change it by technology, by 0:24:15.130 --> 0:24:19.050 doing experiments on an everyday life, by cooking and and 0:24:19.330 --> 0:24:22.770 changing substances in our kitchen we know a lot more 0:24:22.890 --> 0:24:26.250 than our senses revealed, because we know our capacities to 0:24:26.330 --> 0:24:28.650 affect the world and the capacities of the world to 0:24:28.730 --> 0:24:39.610 affect us. When Manuel Delande came to our conference and Warwick, 0:24:40.050 --> 0:24:43.370 it was his first lecture in Europe, and he met 0:24:43.410 --> 0:24:48.770 his first cyborg, Stellarc, right off the plane. When I 0:24:48.850 --> 0:24:52.610 arrived at my hotel, there was a Stellarc waiting for 0:24:52.770 --> 0:24:55.530 his room, and so I got to talk to Stellarc 0:24:55.650 --> 0:24:59.370 right away, which blew my mind. I mean, all the 0:24:59.450 --> 0:25:01.490 post human ones, he was the only one who was 0:25:01.490 --> 0:25:06.290 actually doing something about it. My body is connected to 0:25:06.730 --> 0:25:10.890 a muscal stimulated system with the touch screen interface. You 0:25:11.050 --> 0:25:16.850 attaching bizarre third arms, you know, robotic third arms, and 0:25:17.450 --> 0:25:19.930 swallowing cameras so that they would go their way to 0:25:20.010 --> 0:25:24.370 his stomach, doing all kinds of dangerous things in which 0:25:24.410 --> 0:25:29.570 the materiality of your body what's at steak. Stellarc is 0:25:29.690 --> 0:25:32.770 an Australian artist who started out doing the kind of 0:25:32.850 --> 0:25:36.370 seventies performance art that involved enduring a lot of pain. 0:25:37.210 --> 0:25:40.890 He'd have hooks put through his skin and have himself 0:25:40.930 --> 0:25:45.090 suspended naked in a variety of positions and scenic locations. 0:25:46.010 --> 0:25:50.370 Later he became interested in modifying his body with technology. 0:25:51.370 --> 0:25:56.890 He was up for anything, swallowing things, attaching things, implanting them. 0:25:57.690 --> 0:26:00.570 He was a very cheery fellow. Everyone wants to buy 0:26:00.610 --> 0:26:04.810 him drinks. It also reminds me of an interesting story. 0:26:04.850 --> 0:26:07.610 When I first made the film of the inside of 0:26:07.650 --> 0:26:10.490 the left and right bronchi of the lungs, and I 0:26:10.610 --> 0:26:13.730 realized that the track here was a wind tunnel. You know, 0:26:13.770 --> 0:26:16.170 you breathed there up and down the track here, and 0:26:16.250 --> 0:26:18.290 there was a wind tunnel. So I thought, at that 0:26:18.330 --> 0:26:25.090 time we had the oil crisis and the concern about 0:26:25.250 --> 0:26:28.850 energy conservation, and I thought, well, if I could implant 0:26:28.930 --> 0:26:33.890 a little propeller device in the track ear and through 0:26:33.970 --> 0:26:39.850 my regular breathing, I could in fact generate some electricity, 0:26:41.010 --> 0:26:44.570 like the rest of us laughing along. Manuel de Landa 0:26:44.730 --> 0:26:49.610 admired Stella's experiments on himself, but he didn't think much 0:26:49.770 --> 0:26:52.610 of most of the philosophers he met at Virtual Futures. 0:26:53.250 --> 0:26:56.890 When I asked him about academics, I triggered one of 0:26:57.010 --> 0:27:01.170 his trademark epic rants think about this. Nineteen forty eight 0:27:01.410 --> 0:27:04.450 was the beginning of the baby bomb. Roughly this assumed 0:27:04.450 --> 0:27:06.570 that he lasted ten years all the way to nineteen 0:27:06.650 --> 0:27:09.650 fifty eight, millions of little babies were produced at the 0:27:09.690 --> 0:27:12.170 same time. Now, let's assume that you get ten here 0:27:12.250 --> 0:27:15.370 when you're thirty years old. Let's assume that, so that's 0:27:15.490 --> 0:27:20.010 nineteen seventy eight. All those thousands or millions of babies 0:27:20.250 --> 0:27:23.450 got tenure, or many of those got ten ures simultaneously 0:27:23.450 --> 0:27:27.290 in nineteen seventy eight. Between nineteen nineteen eighty six, a 0:27:27.450 --> 0:27:34.050 massive amount of human flesh entrenched in universities right and 0:27:34.250 --> 0:27:36.930 between nineteen seventy and nineteen eighty six was the peak 0:27:37.370 --> 0:27:41.770 of the fashion of repeating French philosophy without knowing anything 0:27:41.810 --> 0:27:43.890 that you know. And so that means that all those 0:27:43.930 --> 0:27:48.290 fakers and all those bluffers got ten here simply for 0:27:48.370 --> 0:27:51.610 demographic reasons, and we won't get rid of them until 0:27:51.650 --> 0:27:56.570 they die, because they literally are entrenched in every university 0:27:56.650 --> 0:27:59.610 that I got to. So I already knew that when 0:27:59.650 --> 0:28:01.810 I went to work, and so I went there with 0:28:02.130 --> 0:28:06.090 the spirit of being very forgiving, but I couldn't really 0:28:06.170 --> 0:28:10.970 keep it up. Eventually I began exploding, not literally exploding. 0:28:11.090 --> 0:28:15.010 I should say, Manuel is speaking metaphorically here, and you 0:28:15.090 --> 0:28:18.570 probably didn't see that. Hopefully, because when I explode and 0:28:18.610 --> 0:28:23.090 start saying nasty things to bluffers and fakers, I look 0:28:23.250 --> 0:28:26.650 nasty and I look mean, but nevertheless that I can't 0:28:26.650 --> 0:28:32.410 help myself. I didn't notice any behind the scenes confrontations 0:28:32.530 --> 0:28:36.770 between Manuel and this wall of human flesh. No, I 0:28:36.810 --> 0:28:40.370 was too busy marveling at the most unforgettable performer at 0:28:40.370 --> 0:28:51.970 the conference. Her name was and is in more Nor 0:28:52.930 --> 0:29:13.010 sixty measure School, early twenty twenty. I'm in an artist 0:29:13.090 --> 0:29:17.370 studio in Paris. It's a light industrial space cluttered with 0:29:17.410 --> 0:29:24.690 amazing objects, sculpture, light boxes, photographs. Several fashionably dressed assistants 0:29:24.690 --> 0:29:27.090 are hard at work while the artist herself is on 0:29:27.130 --> 0:29:34.250 the phone. Orlane is a startling, glamorous figure, a woman 0:29:34.330 --> 0:29:38.050 in her early seventies with vertical hair half white and 0:29:38.170 --> 0:29:43.410 half black, and a pair of architectural glasses and horns. 0:29:44.490 --> 0:29:49.410 Not massive devil horns, just tasteful bumps implanted under the 0:29:49.450 --> 0:29:55.650 skin on either side of her forehead. At Virtual Futures 0:29:55.690 --> 0:29:59.010 back in the mid nineties, Orlane gave what was probably 0:29:59.090 --> 0:30:03.090 the most scandalous presentation of all, the one that people remembered. 0:30:03.810 --> 0:30:05.730 All I knew about her was that she was a 0:30:05.770 --> 0:30:09.410 French artist who spelled her name in all caps. Like 0:30:09.570 --> 0:30:13.730 her one named Counterparts, dellac or Lyon, used her body 0:30:13.850 --> 0:30:18.410