Moore’s Law has become a common and oft-repeated adage in the technology world: that every two years computer circuitry will halve in size and double in power. The prescience and veracity of this statement, originally made in 1975 (revised from a 1965 prediction of it doubling each year) has proved staggering, and helped encourage research and development that has plunged the world into the digital age, and revolutionised the way we access and respond to culture. Who knew that beyond measures of megahertz and kilobytes lay a different form of power – one to radically alter the landscape of culture and human experience. As a result of this, culture has seeped ever more inescapably into every day lives, finding new forms and means of distribution to saturate our existence with content, images, and brands. With these reality-altering chips pouring out of Silicon Valley, one has to wonder when this valley has become the whole world.
The increasing affordability, portability and accessibility of these chips have revolutionised technology for the last decade, spurring a global age which has shrunk our temporal and spatial distances to almost meaningless measurements. Global society has been pushed ever further into an age of instant information that has revolutionised financial markets, the surveillance society and is now becoming powerful enough to forge new realities.
The mid-Noughties popularity of massive, multiplayer online gaming, and its apparent ability to distort all decent conceptions of sleeping and waking for those more committed denizens, was just the beginning. Nintendo’s Wii and its imitators encouraged virtual reality’s first tentative steps out of the screen and into the consumer mass market. Now hitting the market we have the head-ensconsing Google Glass project (currently being redeveloped), Oculus Rift and Playstation VR headsets. Virtual reality is going mainstream. Anyone who’s seen the demonstrations going out of gaming expo E3 for the last few years know that tangible reality is about to become seemingly plastered with art assets, villains and storytelling. But virtual reality is also becoming increasingly attractive to advertisers, with film content. A recent promotion for Reese Witherspoon vehicle Wild saw users interact with film content. And with VR capturing equipment about to burst into the prosumer market (look to the Nokia OZO), the complete branding of ‘reality’ is about to become commonplace.
But perhaps the most seismic of changes brought about by the proliferation of increasingly shrinking silicon chips is the omnipresent collection of data. Realities that rely upon the hyperreal – online content, videos, Twitter feeds etc. – are now shaped by the fact that indispensable gadgets collect data on our whereabouts, content preferences and usage patterns. The usual sense of panicked unease at this realisation has been explored and moralised on in the paranoia of the seminal Matrix Trilogy. The mantra “If it’s free, you’re the product” is a pretty solid guide to the state of things.
This collecting and utilisation of preferences by giant corporate networks may seem insignificant on an individual level, but it simply isn’t. Access to the young taste-making demographic is vital to marketing firm trying to push its latest meme-able monstrosity into the public’s collective conscious. Companies utilise your browsing history to target advertisements. And the likelihood of you engaging with it? Google probably has a better idea than you.
In the beginnings of the information society, there existed only a comparative handful of channels of information, its curation and policing located more obviously in political institutions and social assumptions that needed to be constantly reinforced. Curation of social and cultural experience was carried out at a higher level, at a remove from the individual. Potentially noxious yes, but it also crystallised a sense of community, common understandings and cultural touchstones. Now this is slipping. The personalisation of reality – that of both the real and the hyperreal – atomises and isolates the individual from tangible reality.
The result? Reinforced ignorance. If we’re constantly presented with what we know, what we know we like, and most importantly what corporations think we’ll want to buy, our horizons will be shrunk by the logable click. Netflix, Youtube and Spotify wring a couple more page views out of you by suggesting media which you’ve already consumed (or which is strikingly similar formally and thematically), and therefore stripped of its cultural and mind-expanding utility. The age of information and media saturation has transformed ignorance into a choice, whilst at the same time obscuring and discouraging the individual from making the active decision to acquire wider knowledge.
Because media-based culture now exists almost totally transnationally, prejudices are reinforced more easily between what were previously cultural hierarchies. Vertically organised groups defined by factors such as age and income now connect laterally, sealing themselves off from the media consumed by those in categories above and below them. YouTube stars, to whom being ‘unchallenging’ in all aspects is the operative mode for building a global audience of middle class teenagers, to whom the three visible walls of their bedroom is about as far as their thirst for ideas reaches. Twitter ‘stanning’ (‘stalker’ + ‘fan’) is perhaps the most obvious example of what happens when youth culture is almost entirely sealed off from wider, and perhaps wiser, cultural supervision, even as self-expression is increasingly monitored and utilised by parties who can monetize your expressed preferences.
Does this paint a dystopian picture? That’s up for you to decide. But after recent pronunciations from Intel execs that the pace of chip development may be falling behind Moore’s Law, it seems we may have to wait a good while longer to reach the zenith (or is that nadir?) of the silicon age
