In a
recent article in this column there was a discussion of the creation of virtual
and augmented reality experiences for people who were bored as passengers in
driverless cars. The particular
experience discussed was making the rider feel like his vehicle was the
Batmobile and he was Batman and he was riding around in Gotham with the
potential to save innocent citizens from the acts of criminals. It is an excellent example of using an
experience that qualifies as kicks as a means of pulling a person out of an
extreme experiential vacuum created by the enclosed frictionless environment of
the interior of an autonomous vehicle, AV.
But the sense of hyperstimulation, this tension-pocket mini-environment
is a special kind of kicks. It is not like drugs, alcohol, gambling or
compulsive sex where the source of stimulation is one defined source of
substance or one defined source of activity.
Same with riding motorcycles or racing cars. A disco is a little like
the Gotham environment, but it’s not totally closed or contained. Rather, it is a social place where a person
interacts with other people who are not directly a part of the virtual reality
environment. The other people pull the
person into the external world. What is
distinct about the Batmobile is that the hyperstimulation comes from a whole
artificial entertainment environment in which a person immerses himself in
order to lift himself out of his numbness and feel more fully alive.
And
the Batmobile is not going to be an isolated instance. All sorts of artificial immersive
entertainments environments are being created in order to pull modern humans
out of their numbness. One other example is the musical lounge chair being
created by the French company Aurasens.
What the chair does is link music to massage. Music is created that is specially attuned to
the rhythms of massage. The massage that
comes out of the chair helps a person to feel the music within a trans-sensory
experience. What makes this an immersive
experience are the headphones that block out noise and the eye mask. In other words, a person is supposed to
immerse himself in sound and touch and nothing else.
This
musical lounge chair is definitely a private immersive experience. The virtual reality experience of the
Batmobile may be less so. After all,
there can be more than one passenger in the autonomous vehicle (AV) having the
same VR experience. Nevertheless, the
Batmobile is still somewhat a private experience, in that social interaction
between passengers will not contribute significantly to the immersive
experience in the same way a couple dancing surrounded by other people dancing
contributes to the kicks experience of loud electronic instruments and strobe
lights at a disco.
As people have more and more kicks experiences, they need stronger and stronger kicks
to pull themselves out of their basic numbness that is the result of the
sensory distortion of being in a modern technological living environment. Normal more organic natural experiences are
not only scarce these days, but they are no longer enough to stimulate a person
to life. People become addicted to kicks
when they are too numb to fully experience other life stimulations.
Up
until recently, the primary way to make kicks more powerful was to make them
more intense. An example would be as
people began to take stronger and stronger drugs for the kick effect. But now it seems that maybe more intense may
no longer be enough. The kicks will have
to envelop a person. And this is where
artificial immersive entertainment experiences come in. They may not be as explosively strong as a
drug. And that’s actually good. So they won’t hurt a person’s physical health. But these experiences temporarily transform a
person’s entire field of experience. The
massage is done by focusing on 30 haptic or touch points on a person, creating
sensations of massage, shake and tingle.
Again as is common with modern technology, the emphasis is on defined
discrete stimuli rather than more organic flowing blendable continual stimuli. What traditionally has been a flowing
blendable continual experience has been turned into an experience that is at
bottom built on digital points. So even
as a person is having an experience that is supposed to sense organic needs, it
is actually an experience that over time slowly reconfigures a person’s nervous
system to become more receptive to machine-based robotic stimuli. The stimuli that come from this mechanized
massage process are not as explosive as previous explosive mechanized
experiences we have discussed in the past: motorcycles, racing cars, loud
electronic music, strobe lights, roller coasters, etc. Here we have found a way of creating kicks
that don’t lead to total jadedness and burn-out. On some level it partly imitates an organic
process. Perhaps this makes it more insidious.
Jadedness and burn-out lead a person to feel incapable of being
receptive to a particular kick stimulus.
And this can be protective. With
the Aurasens invention, there supposedly would be no burn-out.
Perhaps
a close equivalent experience already existing would be a vibrator. But a vibrator does not demand such complete
separation from external world reality and partners sometime use it with each
other. Nevertheless, a vibrator does
subtly reconfigure a person’s nervous system to become more receptive to
mechanical defined discrete stimuli in order to achieve sexual satisfaction.
Using
a vibrator does not require a person to purposely close off all the other
senses besides the one being used the way that the Aurasens massage chair
does. In this case, the vibrator is not
totally a private experience, is not a totally immersive experience the way
that the Aurasens massage chair is. As
people become more and more numb from their modern technological living
environment, private isolating immersive experiences will become an
increasingly important pathway to obtaining an ongoing non-explosive form of
kicks to help them feel alive. And again
what is so insidious about this is precisely because these immersive experiences
are more tolerable for longer period of time, they have the capacity to subtly
transform humans, reconfigure them so that they are more receptive to
machine-based stimuli rather than organic stimuli, and, in the long run,
gradually contribute to the robotization of these humans.
These
immersive experiences seem on the surface to be so innocent. They offer a false sense of grounding, while
gradually transferring people away from their basic human nature. They comprise just one of the many
technological pathways today that are undermining our humanity.
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