New Media Research Studio

Before you forget most of the information from The Trap, stop reading this post, stop everything for an hour and listen to OK Computer by Radiohead.

(The track listing is messed up on my link, it’ll be easier if you own the album. If not, look at the track listing on the wiki linked under the album name.)

Even if you’re not into Radiohead, even if you’re not into music, just do it. You might even want to read the lyrics too. If The Trap explained why we have a shitty society operating under the assumption that we’re always playing Fuck You Buddy, then this album is it’s soundtrack.

After watching the film, in addition to having a minor existential crisis, I was amazed at how much influence the computer has had on Western culture. It seems that from the Cold War on, we’ve just given up everything we can to the power of the computer. The modern world is, quite undeniably, controlled by the binary logic of the computer. Sick or Healthy? Normal or Abnormal? Freedom or Slavery? Everything seems to be reduced to dichotomies that, while on the surface may seem appealing, do nothing to make the world a better place.

The problem with everything seems to me to be that very few complex things have simple answers.

For example, how do people behave in societies? They act in order to maximize personal gain. Who, in their right mind, would ever look at that statement and think it was an adequate answer to such a complicated question? “In their right mind” is maybe the key phrase there as even the guy who came up with the answer was clearly not in his right mind when he made it up. I would argue that statements like that come about when people start to think about the world in the same way a computer does. Unfortunately, strange logic such as that has been used to order the world in the last 50 years or so, and it’s done a great job of bringing the whole world into a big game of Fuck You Buddy. Who wants to live in a world where the only logical solution, in fact the only way to win, is to screw over the other guy? If there’s any doubt as to whether or not we’re actually living in a world predominated by that logic consider Madoff’s method of winning the game of life. Maybe I’ve answered my own question, the people who like the logic are the ones with a sufficient lack of humanity to play the computer’s game.

Meanwhile everyone is literally asking to be medicated so they’re “normal” again. This brings back the initial point, that people have placed so much trust in the assumption that the logic of the computer can order a very illogical world. We’ve convinced ourselves that there is a normal, that when we’re right the people that disagree are wrong, and that everything does have a solution. The crazy thing is that when our calculations don’t work out, we’ll just make stuff up to fit the model, just like Nash making assumptions about people to make game theory work.

I suppose the film left me mostly with the idea that we’ve surrendered to the fallibility of our humanity, and hoped to replace it with the logic of computers. Now we’re left with a world where we don’t tolerate failure, we don’t trust anything, and many of us are unhappy. I don’t think I have an answer to the problem, in fact I think having an answer is a problem in itself, but we certainly need to keep working on alternatives or before we know it we’ll look like this.

Possibly Relevant Posts:

• John Nash and the Ambiguity of Game Theory (4) | Jessica
• The Attack of the Machines… (5) | andrea_arellano
• Freeing the Trap: Faith (0) | Austine