User:Thalia de Jong/Synopsis Future Map

In 1964 the originator of cybernetics Norbert Wiener, asked this valid question: Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?

This question is still relevant today, in liberal a society that is no longer being watched by one almighty Big Brother, but is surveilled by contemporary cybernetic technology, that is devoted to controlling our future.

This technology is used for political reasons as well as economics, and constantly mapping out customer behaviour for marketing strategies next to printing out possible outcomes of war in the Middle East.

In his 1978 lectures Foucault explains how our liberal society is constantly adjusting the parameters of our open environment so as to stimulate and channel probable behaviors of the population.

Steven Spielbergs film ‘Minority Report’ is a science fiction flick that depicts a possible future that this society is heading in. It shows a world that is run by a most extreme kind of surveillence, where the future can be precisely predicted by the government. This Hollywood way of seeing the future might seem far fetched. But even as Minority Report hit the movie theaters, consultants for the United States Department of Defense proposed a computerized “Policy Analysis Market” (PAM) that would be able to map out the trading interface in the eventuality of say “Jordanian monarchy overthrown in 4th quarter 2004,” or “Arafat assassinated in 4th 2004”.

Our society’s obsession with controlling the future (and insuring accumulation) has at least two consequences. The first is the organization of a consumer environment for the immediate satisfaction of anticipated desires, with the effect of eliminating a natural kind of desire. The second consequence is the simple removal of those who might conceivably trouble this tranquilized landscape with any kind of disturbing presence or speech.

Norbert Wiener in ’64 thought that by placing flawless reason on a single continuum with the imperfect human mind and the limited electronic computer, he could open up a more flexible ethical space, unbound to any ideology whether of religion or science. Yet today it is within this interface of God, man and machine that the Manichean games of corporate and military strategy are played, with few significant questions as to the rules, the stakes or the final causes.

And until artists, hackers and cultural critics are joined by scientists, sociologists, economists and philosophers with the purpose to transform this, there will be no deep and distributed critique of military neoliberalism, nor of the surveillance that articulates it.