Yet another world
I just realized something kind of patently obvious about the success of Avatar, James Cameron’s high-tech 3D blockbuster, so forgive me if it sounds kind of “Duh!”
Avatar is all about us, and our virtual online worlds.
I mean, what is this billion-dollar-grossing fantasy, really, but a gloss on social networking sites and the people who live on them?
Sure, it’s about a greedy corporation that hires skilled people to plant into an exotic, off-world locale as look-alikes (avatars) to study the native inhabitants and gain their trust.
Sure, it ends with the greedy corporation unleashing the military, the better to get at the infinite energy source (unobtainium) and mow down anything that stands in their way.
What is it, really, though, but a cinematic lesson on how to “unFriend” people who don’t behave the way you’d like them to?
Avatar has achieved an almost fascistic level of worldwide success thanks to many factors: a) director James Cameron is a control freak/geek who defines every move in terms of winning; he would never allow Avatar to fail, not after a decade of planning and production, not after the high-stakes gamble of Titanic paid off so embarrassingly huge; b) the movie was released simultaneously in just about every single theater in the world; so that kind of guarantees a good opening weekend, and the word of mouth about the jaw-dropping 3D effects added to the tsunami ripple; c) the script, like Titanic’s, is unapologetically hokey and romantic, though it lacks the crucial human dimension of the previous movie’s two fine actors, Leo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet (on the other hand, it does have a risible catchphrase — “I see you” — to match “You jump, I jump” in terms of cringiness).
All of the above explains the box-office success of Avatar.
But why now?
Why is it the top-grossing movie in, say, China, much to Beijing’s chagrin?
It has to do with the imaginary world(s) that people now choose to inhabit.
This goes beyond Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, et al. It’s more of a lifestyle choice that people are increasingly making.
They want to control a world.
Not the world, mind you. Only people like Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Steve Jobs get to do that.
No, most people now prefer to carve out a terrain of online space that makes perfect sense whenever they choose to click on it, scan it, interact with it. They build this world — this Facebook profile, this YouTube playlist, this Twitter roster — with loving care, and get quite agitated when it fails to meet their expectations. So they set about making it right, using up that one precious, non-renewable resource — time — in the process.
Is this a familiar sight to most of us? You enter a sala nowadays, and instead of everyone crowded around a TV, watching a movie or whatever, each one in the room has a separate laptop open. They’re crowded around their separate Facebook pages, of course — tending their imaginary farms, redecorating the domiciles of their separate virtual pets, playing gangsters or serving customers in a cute little imaginary café. They’re crowded around a Wi-Fi source, basically, though the TV is also, no doubt, on, beaming its muzzy messages in the background. We’ve become modern cave dwellers, sitting around a communal fire, though the flickering images on the cave walls are not for discussion, for storytelling, but for personal, mostly solitary amusement.
Conversation is minimal in the modern cave. Our eyes are focused on screens, our fingers on keypads. Despite recent claims that the Internet does not isolate us, it’s hard to square this with an image of people silently and individually tending their virtual gardens, in their perfected virtual spaces.
The problem with perfected virtual spaces is that we come to rely on them, forgetting that the world really isn’t like that. The other problem is that those who live “off the grid” — who, for whatever reason, can’t really commit to a long-term relationship online — become shut out of so many loops it’s not even funny. It goes beyond the ostracization found in high school cliques. It amounts to this: if you’re not on so-and-so social network site, you have little frame of reference with those who are; therefore you, effectively, don’t exist.
That stuff in The Matrix? It’s not science fiction, it’s here.
A new generation of Facebook Widows and Widowers can attest to it.
There was a great buzz about a virtual world experiment a few years back called Second Life. People created avatars of themselves. They invested “real” money in imaginary plots of land. They bought virtual fashion for their avatars with “real” money (though arguably the people who spend on Second Life don’t look at the money they click away with PayPal as “real” in any real sense; they never see it, after all; it’s just a statement on a credit card bill every month). What seems to have happened is that Second Life became redundant, or went underground, as millions of people started to construct the same sort of virtual worlds in their own ways — largely on social networking sites. A recent survey says American teens, for instance, spend almost all of their waking hours online, or attached to some device that’s web-connected. That’s old news to Korean kids, who have been living online for a decade.
The Second Life experiment was right on the mark, though; it simply got overtaken by a tsunami even bigger than Avatar: people’s desires to create their own ad-hoc worlds outstripped even the confines of Second Life.
Author Jonathan Letham touches on this trend in his latest novel, Chronic City, with a spoof called Yet Another World. This online world runs smack up against a dire scenario known as Simulated Worlds Theory. The theory says that the world (or universe) may in fact be a system of computer programs generated by some god or gods (“simulators”) for their own amusement (The Matrix again, but really just old-hat sci-fi Philip K. Dickian paranoia). But this amusement park eats up energy, rather than creating it. And once a certain population in the imaginary world learns how to create its own imaginary worlds… well, there’s trouble.
The problem,” Oona continued, “is that our simulated reality might be allowed to continue if it were either informative or entertaining enough to be worth the computing power. Or anyway, as long as we didn’t use too much, they might not unplug us… So the moment we develop our own computers capable of spinning out their own virtual universes — like Yet Another World — we become a drastic drain on their computing power. It’s exponential, because now they to generate all of our simulations, too. We wouldn’t be worth the trouble at that point, we’d have blown the budget allocated to our particular little simulation. They’d just pull our plug. I mean, they’d have millions of other realities running, they’d hardly miss us.”
What’s Oona’s way out of the quandary? How do we prevent ourselves from being unplugged? “If possible, keep our simulators really entertained.”
One suspects this can’t be done solely by clicking away online.
