I'm having a Matrix moment. You know the feeling: a vague sinking sensation when reality seems as if it is being simulated inside an enormous computer. A neo-Neo moment.
This week, Google bought YouTube for $1.65-billion. YouTube, in case you've been dead or under a large rock, is the website where you can view videos that people have uploaded to the Internet. Only a little more than a year old, it has the largest library of videos available on the Web. Most of them are pretty silly, but in among the shots of people getting hit in the crotch, and croc hunter Steve Irwin being fatally barbed by a stingray, are some other more curious offerings.
YouTube is a conspiracy theorist's dream, as the number of clips that claim the collapse of the World Trade Center was a setup attest to. This democratization continues on Google Video (soon to swallow YouTube whole and complete its domination), which offers a number of feature documentaries including one called The Net by German filmmaker Lutz Dammbeck. The Net recently screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival, but you can watch it free on the Web as many times as you would like.
This documentary explores the curious relationship between the development of the Internet and Ted Kaczynski (a.k.a. the Unabomber).
Mr. Dammbeck interviews several influential people, including John Brockman and Stewart Brand (old hippies turned founding members of the digerati); Robert Taylor, who helped to initiate the Arapanet (the precursor to the Internet); and the 90-year-old father of cybernetics, Heinz von Foerster, who offers up a few wry observations about the nature of reality itself.
Along the way, there are also traipses through Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, the Macy Conferences, Theodor Adorno's Authoritarian Personality, the connection between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the military, Norbert Wiener and cybernetics, Henry A. Murray and the LSD experiments at Harvard and crazy old Mr. Kaczynksi with his terror of mind control and supercomputers.
Are you lost yet? I've watched the film a few times, and I'm still not quite sure what it all means, or if it means anything at all. Like the Internet itself, the bewildering density of information requires careful sorting.
But one idea does jump out. John Brockman paraphrases a quote from Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist's Reflections on the Brain by J.Z. Young that states: "We create tools and then we mould ourselves through our use of them."
In the brave new world of Google Video, YouTube, MySpace, et al., what does this mean? If we create technology and then become what we have created, have we now succeeded in making Jackass World?
Although Johnny-come-Knoxvilles abound at YouTube, the site doesn't actually make money. This matters little. What Google is paying for is popularity, the sheer number of eyes looking at dumb videos. The lowest common denominator often rises to the top; here, the inmates are not only running the asylum, they also built it brick by brick.
In traditional media, still characterized by parental figures, or gatekeepers if you will, someone can decide that watching beheadings is probably not in the best interest of the public.
In the case of the Internet, which sometimes appears like a Wild West version of democracy, or maybe, more correctly, romper stomper room, the dubious cost of freedom is as apparent as the crotch shot on your screen.
Should you really be allowed to watch snuff films, even if they do originate at the end of an innocent stingray? Even more dubious is access to more porn than is wise or healthy, and its deleterious effects on young women and men. The information superhighway, as it was once so quaintly termed, has a dark swollen underbelly, bloated with cheap product and questionable content.
