The
other day, I attended a social event that combined music, food and mostly
intelligent conversation. And then there
was my friend Tom, who was manipulating a controller in order to fly what
looked like a flying saucer, to the amusement of some of the guests during the
intermission for the music. This object
glided and hovered and climbed up and swooped down. And, of course, the object wasn’t attached to
the controller the way that model planes used to be attached to a controller
when I was growing up. But in those
days, all one could do with the flying object was to take it around in
circles. Today the electronic flying objects
have so much more freedom in their movements.
Even though they are still manipulated through a controller, they appear
autonomous. And they entrance their
viewers, as if they were unpredictable autonomous entities.
These
toys are called nano drones, and they are smaller versions of the bigger drones
that are used for military and commercial purposes. And in today’s modern technological world,
they are sources of fascination for young and old alike (my friend Tom is in
his sixties). And unlike the model
planes of old, where the cord connecting the plane to the person flying it was
visible, the nano drones appear to be autonomous. They are sophisticated seemingly autonomous
complex behavioral entities that seduce people into sustained observation. They are a toy that has moved beyond the
interactive toys like video games in certain ways. Perhaps the closest toy to them, on one
level, is the wind-up toy, but wind-up toys have a very robotic angular
movement and they stop moving after a relatively short time. So they don’t have nearly the hypnotic power
of a nano drone.
And
that hypnotic quality is not simply influential for the periods of time a
person is watching all the wonderful fancy manoeuvers of the nano drone. It becomes a contributory factor in the whole
range of frictionless mediated activities in which a person participates that
make him passive and numb. For the
operation of the nano drone, the manoeuvers are minimal, and therefore, the
imprints that the operator makes on his field of experience are minimal as
well, as are the imprints that he preserves.
Perhaps the people who saw Tom that night will remember him as the first
person to show them how a nano drone works, and he will engrave an imprint on
their memories. But as more and more
people start using the nano drone toys, all the different operators will start
blurring together in the minds of the members of Tom’s original audience. The variability in the styles of different
operators just isn’t that significant and that important. Operating a nano drone just doesn’t lend itself
to becoming an individualized art or sport the way, let’s say, driving a
dogsled with huskies does.
And
yet activities like operating a nano drone are going to be a larger and larger
portion of people’s time as seemingly autonomous
complex behavioral entities proliferate and take over a greater and greater
share of the marketplace for toys. At
this point, it might prove illustrative to discuss the nano drones in relation
to another kind of seemingly autonomous toy: model trains. Unlike the flying airplanes, model trains are
similar to nano drones in that they move around without being connected to a
cord to the people who are operating them and causing them to move around. But unlike nano drones, they move on a fixed
route over and over again, a route that is defined by the railroad tracks. Model trains are dependent on another
creation of humans – railroad tracks – to define their routes and to give them
the means to move forward. By contrast,
every time that a nano drone flies, the operator is defining unique constantly
novel routes for it. This is at least
partly the reason that a nano drone is so hypnotic. For many people, a model train can get
boring, because it has one or possibly a few fixed routes (depending on the
complexity of the display) that it can follow.
But an operator of a nano drone has an infinite number of routes that it
can follow with its seemingly autonomous flying patterns. It is this novelty that impels people to keep
looking at a nano drone when it is in operation. And it is this novelty that distracts people
and takes time away from the activities involved in a person making, receiving
and preserving organic imprints, from the wealth of primary experience activities
that are available to humans.
Finally,
a comparison is in order between a nano drone and screen reality phenomena like
television, video games and computers.
In the minds of most people, there would be a certain psychological
separation between screen reality activities and activities in the external
world. On some level, people know that
screen reality activities aren’t real to the extent that they lack mass, matter
and substance in the external world, even though they provide a highly mediated
seemingly autonomous experience. This
blurs the lines between mediated experience and primary experience and
ultimately between screen reality, with its more passive human involvement, and
external world reality, which requires a more active human involvement. A nano drone toy draws people from a more
active external world posture to the kind of hypnotic passive posture
associated with screen reality experience.
A
nano drone toy is one more phenomenon that ultimately numbs people and makes it
more difficult for them to live a rich vibrant primary experience life. Its entrancing hypnotic quality is precisely
what makes it an up and coming contributory factor in numbing our senses of
self and our consciousness.
© 2018 Laurence Mesirow
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