The Weekly Screed (#613)

There is no here here
By David Benjamin

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”

— Albert Einstein

LAS VEGAS — Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, where the love of gadgets ascends to the level of religiosity, I’m an atheist in the basilica. I feel no tingle when I encounter a tower of 80-inch ultra-high definition TV screens, stacked to the ceiling of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). But as I scoff, all around me — each open-mouthed and mute with awe, each blinded to all else by a pair of 3-D Foster Grants — the CES faithful gape and marvel and believe.

In just one hall here, there are perhaps a thousand screens — no, 10,000, because, besides the myriad vivid displays at each booth, each communicant bears on his or her person at least two personal screens. In this sea of screens, without a life vest, I think about the early scenes — which I would need a screen to watch — of Fahrenheit 451. Director François Truffaut depicts a dystopian world where books are banished and burned, where every room of every house has one wall devoted to constant, invasive, mandatory and infinitely banal telewocky.

Thoughts of Ray Bradbury’s classic remind me of other stories in which  addictive video and constant “infotainment” squeeze from the human mind the capacity for thought, for discourse and judgment. Fleeing the exhibition hall to the corridors of the convention center, I think of the zombified GIs in The Manchurian Candidate. To these images, I add the giant-screen mob-chanting of 1984, and Ron Goulart’s little appreciated but chilling series of TekWar stories — in which TV, fired point-blank into the human brain, becomes narcotic and obliterates consciousness. I think about “brainwashing” as I struggle to dodge my fellow conventioneers, most of whom stagger and wander and cannot walk a straight line because they are, unanimously, staring at screens and tapping on keyboards and small-talking into microphones too tiny to see with the naked eye.

The armies of CES salesmen are well-intended. All they want is to make our lives better, more convenient, more “connected.” CES introduces not those diabolic devices with which Oriental villains and deviant therapists purloin our minds and erase our individuality, but — with soft lights and seductive music, space-age design and touch-screen responsiveness — it bestows upon us the twirly, shiny toys that will help us all, willingly, render our minds spic, and span, and spotless.

Wandering into another LVCC hall, I look up, to see what all those people looking up — in rapt silence with a silly smile on their faces — are looking up at.

Well, it’s everything you could imagine on TV. A tiger stalks the jungle primeval. A glacier glows beneath the arctic sun. A condor crosses the sky. A soccer player windmills the ball into the goal. A daisy opens and welcomes a bee.

This would all seem mundane, even boring, except that it’s so ungodly, unnaturally clear. At CES, we look not at the world as we see it, but as most of us — with 20-200 vision, or astigmatism, or incipient cataracts, or plain old quotidian eye fatigue — can’t see it, and never did. We’re seeing it in high-definition video multiplied by four. We’re seeing this dull stuff — tropical fish munching on a reef, a fern trembling in the breeze — with such screaming, living-color, pixel-intensive clarity that our pupils begin to twitch and our tear ducts overflow.

But we dare not, must not, cannot look away, because here, Tom Swift, is the future. These are the screens that will demand our attention and rule our consciousness, subsume and devour us and guide us by our captive retinae, for the rest of our lives. Soon there will be enough pixels on your interactive UHD living-room television screen to replace every cell inside the average human skull.

In The Manchurian Candidate (probably the great American mesmerism novel), author Richard Condon depicted the art of brainwashing as a sort of implanted tumor that lay dormant in the cerebellum until a verbal trigger brought it to life. The enslaved brain launched its seditious machinations only when it heard the fateful words: “Why don't you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?”

What Condon didn’t reveal is that brainwashing doesn’t need mad Red scientists, hours of laborious indoctrination and a lot of hocus-pocus involving the queen of diamonds. It only requires a pocket-size screen, an infinite number of “apps” and the weak, incurious mind with which all of us are endowed at birth.

As both Orwell and Bradbury suggested, brainwashing is possible without coercion or duress, or even a third party. To spare us from the dreams and solutions that might occupy a brain that’s been fertilized with a little healthy dirt, we sanitize our minds spontaneously. We stand in line overnight to be the first to buy the “next-generation” screen. We demand more and better apps, lest the screen, like the rest of life, lose its novelty.

Once, not long ago, it was necessary that I be captured in battle, then tortured, drugged, kept sleepless, naked and isolated by the evil minions of Dr. Fu Manchu, if I had any hope of being well and thoroughly vegetized. Nowadays, the process is so much easier it’s downright fun. Today, the world’s biggest commercial trade show is dedicated to the constant improvement and universal dispersion of the finest self-brainwashing technology ever conceived. In CES, mankind has created a laundromat of the mind. Here, one tours an endless row of windows into the make-believe, in a city whose stroke of architectural genius was creating acres and acres of indoors with no windows, thus precluding any fleeting urge to look up, to peer past the moment, to see beyond the id, to wonder what might be going on out there…

…somewhere, anywhere but here.