A Quick Comment Before Bed

-

Combining the streaming aspect of Netflix with the Xbox 360 is pretty much brilliant. Blockbuster's doom is pretty much all but certain as far as I can see. I don't know if I even care about the dvd mailing part of Netflix. Just the streaming part is pretty cool (even if it is somewhat limited). This is already going to save Lilly and myself lots of money in terms of what we watch. We won't have to buy the two Stargate SG-1 movies for example. I don't need to find the last three seasons of Red Dwarf I've been wanting to watch. We don't have to wait to catch up on Heroes season 3. This is pretty cool. We watched "Legend of the Drunken Master" (2) tonight for movie night courtesy of this functionality. Just as easy as Time Warner's video on demand feature....minus the $3.99-$5.99 per movie view. Compared to that as a benchmark: If we watch more than 2 movies a month, we'll have already earned our monthly $8.99 Netflix fee in terms of what we've received. We live in such a culture of instant gratification. This sort of service may end up being the death of the corner video store, and possibly the doom for couch potato haters everywhere.

To venture into the realm of the philosophical for a second: This sort of functionality could be the death of civilization. Seriously. Nothing will promote laziness more than instant gratification we have begun to receive at home. There are already people who won't leave their houses because they seem to have everything they need there. We can easily communicate with our friends from home in a variety of ways. We can order food to our home (not quite instantly yet, but wouldn't that be something?). Many people can work from home, and most can find entertainment that they actually want only a button away at home. I remember a bit of a scandal a couple of years ago because someone set up a site where people could actually hunt deer from home. (I think it was shut down) Imagine what will happen when robots permeate our society and we can, controlling them from home, extend a physical reach into the real world via a mechanical (instead of virtual) avatar. How will a church respond when the members start showing up in avatar form?

I think it's pretty obvious our bodies are not meant for this. The logical ramifications of such a stagnation of even a segment of a modern society would suggest the fall of that country or community long before the rest of the world came with it. Or would it?

I remember reading in C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength" about how the N.I.C.E.'s eventual plan was to replace real trees and real birds with metal trees with metal birds that sang the recordings of long dead bird songs. The metal trees would serve the same breathable air providing function of the replaced real trees. They would just be metal and therefore devoid of life. It was all about purifying the world. What were they purifying it of? Life. Is that dissimilar to how we presently enter a world where only our perceived experiences matter to us? Where a virtual, computer generated reality is mimicking actual reality to the point where we no longer care which is which? There are scientists and engineers working on technologies that would allow the replication of smells. Why? So that we can watch movies or play video games and smell the realness of the simulated environment. Visual replication will only go so far before we can not visually distinguish the difference between real and fake. We're closer to that than it seems. As engineers work to create more perfect virtual realities that simulate everything from motion and sight to the smells and physical sensations of a simulated reality, a future not too dissimilar from the science fiction of The Matrix becomes less difficult to see.

I digress. I'm not going to be the first to think like this. Obviously so in fact. When we see movies like The Matrix, they are a warning to the future possibility of these ideas. Possible futures where we can get almost anything we want, even sex, without leaving our homes or even coming into contact with another human being. It's a frightening, dismal picture, and some of us may see large parts of it come to pass within our lifetimes. Almost certainly within our children's lifetimes if Christ does not return first or if a world war does not send our civilization into oblivion. The avalanche starts with a tiny snowball. Inch by inch new ways and new habits leap into our lives as the pace of civilization's growth grows faster and faster. How do you want it to end?

In the meantime, I still really like the instant gratification of being able to obtain my favorite mind dulling entertainment and media material at the press of a button. I think this will continue to get worse and worse though, and I wonder when we will hit the bottom.

note: The following, being the text of C.S. Lewis's which I mention above, is also a rather convincing argument for sex. :)

At dinner [Mark Studdock] sat next to Filostrato. There were no other members of the inner circle within earshot. The Italian was in good spirits and talkative. He had just given orders for the cutting down of some fine beech trees in the grounds.

"Why have you done that, Professor?” said a Mr. Winter who sat opposite. “I shouldn't have thought they did much harm at that distance from the house. I'm rather fond of trees myself."

"Oh yes, yes," replied Filostrato. “The pretty trees , the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the briar. The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilised tree in Persia. It was a French attache who had it, because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminium. So natural, it would even deceive."

"It would hardly be the same as a real tree," said Winter.

"But consider the advantages! You get tired of him in one place: two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."

"I suppose one or two, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."

"Why one or two? At present, I allow, we must have forest for the atmosphere. Presently we find a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."

"Do you mean," put in a man called Gould, “that we are to have no vegetation at all?”

"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the English fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."

"I wonder what the birds will make of it?”

"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."

"It sounds," said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life."

"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, `Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?”

"Go on," said Winter.

"And you, especially you English, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."

"That's true."

"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms - sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."

"What are you driving at, Professor?” said Gould.

"After all we are organisms ourselves."

"I grant it. That is the point. In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould - all sprouting and budding and breeding and decay­ing. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course; slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."

"I don't think that would be much fun," said Winter.

"My friend, you have already separated the Fun, as you call it, from the fertility. The Fun itself begins to pass away. Bah! I know that is not what you think. But look at your English women. Six out of ten are frigid are they not? You see? Nature herself begins to throw away the anachronism. When she has quite thrown it away, then real civilisation becomes possible. You would understand if you were peasants. Who would try to work with stallions and bulls? No, no; we want geldings and oxen. There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex.

- C.S. Lewis - That Hideous Strength