"We've Learned Earth Language Through the World Wide Web" - Transformers: The Movie

A friend once told me a story. It perfectly fits the structure of an urban myth - foaflore as they say - but I like to believe it is true nonetheless. It involves a friend of this friend whose sister somehow met and befriended Barbara Bush, twin daughter of Laura and George W. whilst at Yale. So this guy's sister and the Bush girl get quite close and one day, a few years ago now, my friend's friend finds out his whole family - mum, dad and sister - all went bowling. With the Bushes. Barbara, and her mum and dad, at that time the President and First Lady. Turns out Dubya had rather a habit back then of referring to himself in the third person. But not as George, but Potus - an acronym for President Of The United States. As in, Potus takes the ball, Potus bowls, Potus hits a strike!

I'd almost forgotten about this story until I watched Transformers, Michael Bay's (2007) toy-inspired high concept science fiction action movie. Quite near the beginning of the film (in which we only see the President as a pair of red [=Republican] socks asking for some Ding Dongs), a secret service guy refers to the computer system on Air Force One as the "Potus Mainframe." Transformers is big on NewSpeak and acronyms. The military, echoing minitrue and miniluv as much as comintern, refer to SecDef, and John Turturro's Agent Simmons coins his very own Three Letter Acronym - NBE, for Non-Biological Extra-terrestrial ("Try to keep up with the acronyms") - one of Intelligent Life's "quintessentially modern annoyances."

It was executive producer Steven Spielberg who suggested to the writers the idea that the central idea of the film should be, quite simply, "a boy and his car." It is no wonder that General Motors supplied over two hundred cars for the film-makers to destroy. Bobby B (!), the used car salesman, speaks of the "mystical bond between man and machine" before introducing us to a car that wants to be sold, hypermodern equivalent, perhaps, to Douglas Adams's canard concerning an animal - served at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe - that wants to be eaten. The mystical bond in question soon transpires to be the car's mysterious ability to translate directly the driver's desires and speak them through a language of 70s rock classics.

But Transformers is more than just an advert for cars. It is an advert for practically everything, from Apple computers and fashionably distressed Strokes t-shirts to weapons of mass destruction and Armageddon itself. More than glib abbreviations and initialisms, the film speaks the language of brands (Porsche, X-Box, Panasonic, Nokia, Hasbro), of products that have quite literally been taught to speak our language by the internet, so they say things like "Sorry! My bad." Transformers could be said to stage the perfect hypermodern myth: the final violent (albeit notably bloodless) battle between brand identity multinational corporations and nation-state governments - and the government are clearly the bad guys here. Even the government men know they are the bad guys. When the man from the mysterious Sector 7 refers to his "ridiculous government salary" he could be quoting Glenn Beck.

Of course, when that final confrontation between the nation-states and the brands they protect (but perhaps not quite enough - not in the eyes of the products) comes, not just the consumers, but the military - "Our Boys" - will be on the side of the products. The police are bad guys - "to punish and enslave" - but the military are on Our Side and need as much of our money as we can give them. "You're a soldier now!" Josh Duhamel says to Shia LeBeouf. Everyone's a soldier now, taking up arms to protect their consumer goods. The U.S. military and Ministry of Defense provided a great deal of support for the film's production, giving the film-makers real soldiers as extra, authentic uniforms for any other extras, free brand new F-22 aircraft. Michael Bay was given tank catalogues to browse, picking and choosing as he pleased. Some of this stuff was donated from the military's Future Force Warrior and Future Combat System programmes.

But what is Optimus Prime saying, when he says to the government men of Sector Seven, "Taking the children was a bad move" ? This isn't a case of Zizek's Hollywood anti-capitalism, capitalism containing its own critique. This is a direct rebuke from the products to the state. Children may die, and often have died, as a result of government decisions but the brand identity multi-national corporations will always look after the children, because when you're making profit growth predictions for the next ten or twenty years you better look after the children, no matter what you're selling. The state has been largely barred access to the language of the future lately. The only people who talk about the future are the brands and the military. Our future consumers and future force warriors, the future of motoring and future combat systems.

"Fate has yielded its reward - a new world to call home. We live among its people now, hiding in plain sight, but watching over them in secret, waiting, protecting... Like us, there is more to them than meets the eye." For we too share the glimmer of commodity fetishism, having given up the Soul for the souls of products. They are watching over us now, the only ones looking out for the future. In the war against the machines, the people will take the side of the machines and gladly destroy their own civilization.

"Celebrities are Certain to be Accredited Miracles" : Remembering the Future

It should be a cautionary experience for today's would-be-futurists to read those projections now a few decades old. Recently I have been reading a curious addition to this canon, named Futureprobe and written by Nigel Collins and Arthur Cotterell, a community worker and a lecturer in charge of adult education respectively, first published in 1974 by Heineman Educational Books (a "Teacher's Book," we are told, accompanies this volume, but alas Oxfam didn't have it). So much of Futureprobe is written in the language of inevitability - x or y, or at the very least some development in x or y, are always bound to happen.

To the credit of Messers Collins and Cotterell, they do at least frequently offer two or three opposing scenarios - one a "nightmare", the other a more optimistic "daylight scenario" (and occasionally "twilight" between them). More than can be said for many of today's futurists, especially those concerned with developments to do with the internet. Most of whom are so in thrall to Thatcher's TINA doctrine that any possible future outcome, aside from that featured in the latest Google press release, is literally inconceivable.

Despite, refusing to speculate beyond the distant horizon of 2000AD, however, it is notable how few of the predictions, or even anything like them, whether nightmare or bright daylight, have come true. Indeed, in the case of most of the salient points under discussion, things have remained rather static (though this is obviously not for a moment to suggest that nothing in the world has changed since 1974 - though, as Brian Aldiss has remarked, the idea, for instance, that the Soviet Union might collapse before the century's end would have been considered too far-fetched even for science fiction only a decade before it actually happened).

What is interesting, in the light of the thesis put forward in Hervé Juvin's The Coming of the Body, is that, for the authors of Futureprobe, such still-distant promises as Martian colonies and manned space flight beyond the solar system, a leisure society made possible by a robotic workforce, the end of pollution thanks to solar-powered cities and the death of the petrol-powered automobile; are evidently considered to be of an equal level of plausibility as a number of developments with which we are all now familiar, at least from the news if not from our own lives - the transplantation of any organ but the brain; the xenografting of tissue from other animals in surgical procedures; euthanasia centres; and the cloning of mammalian life forms. It may well be that in 1974 all these things really were equally possible, equally near and equally far, but that the mechanisms of politics and scientific research have seemingly progressed only with regard to the body.

Sounds Like Dystopia

"It's the year 2010 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the video display in the mirror, and you watch a bit of personalized news while you get ready for the day. You step into the shower and your personalized music program is ready for you, cued up with a new live version of a track that you downloaded the other day. It is even better than the original recording, so while you dress, you tell your "Taste Mate" program to include the new track in your playlist rotation.

You put on your new eyeglasses, which contain a networked audio headset, letting tiny earbuds slip into your ears. You switch on the power, and the mix that your friend makes for you starts to play. Music pours into your consciousness. It becomes yours.

After breakfast with your family, you head off to work and the Personal Media Minder asks if you wish to finish the audiobook you started yesterday morning. You confirm and listen while you walk to the train that takes you to your job.

During the day, your headset and other wireless devices help you communicate across the network, with your friends, associates, network buddies, and "digital peers." The headset also keeps you connected to that hard rock collection that you really love to listen to. Meanwhile, a variety of new songs, new versions, and remixes of tracks that you truly dig, along with your old favorites, continues to come your way. Using TasteMate, you access and trade playlists, and recommend a couple of songs to your friend in Seattle, and they get added to his rotation. Music propels you through the day.

On the way home, you choose your usual dose of news, sports, weather, and the latest dirt on your favorite bands and movie stars. The headset syncs to the active 3D displays that project images just in front of your eyes, or onto the communal screens available on the train and at home. You decide what you hear and see, and who can share in the experience. The Media Minder blends and delivers the programming you select, along with whatever variety of new music you decide to explore. It also determines how that music is chosen, with the help of the TasteMate program.

Back at home, you cruise into the evening with the house system sending soft dinner jazz to various speaker systems in your house, as you serve up one of your culinary specialties, then pay your bills. One of these bills is your media and entertainment subscription, which includes your monthly music, video, network, and communications charges; it's always lower than your heating or water bill. Incoming calls from your friends blend into the programming that surrounds you, as you see fit. After dinner, you clean up, perhaps enjoy a couple of games with friends across your virtual network, and begin to wind down with some New Age derivatives of Mozart's original compositions, which you discovered late one night while cruising through the music sharing channels. . . . "

- The Future of Music (2005)

For those of you to whom, like me, the above seems like a vision of hell to exceed Dante's darkest fantasies, it may come as something of a shock to discover that it's authors, David Kusek and Gerd Leonhard, regard this is something to look forward to, something to eagerly anticipate and benignly encourage. Over some 190 pages, the authors expound their notion of "music as water: ubiquitous and free flowing" as the coming paradigm of all music consumption. No matter that almost every page displays their absolute stupidity with regard to music. They don't even understand water.

For when Leonhard and Kusek propose a model of music as water, they are evidently not talking about music as a publicly funded, state-run monopoly. No, their supposedly utopian vision of the future of the music industry involves the transformation of music into a privatized utility. "Do we feel that water companies have undue monopolistic powers, and do we consider water to be a "product"?" They ask rhetorically, as though the expected negative response was so obvious as to scarcely require thinking about.

But when three multinational corporations control the water supply of over one hundred nations; when water privatization in England and Wales has led to an increase in price, an erosion of working conditions, an increase in household disconnections, a deterioration in the service provided, and no increase in water quality; when the IMF-imposed sale of the water supply to the Cochabamba region in Bolivia led to the Bechtel Corporation of San Francisco gaining legal ownership of all of Cochabamba's water supply - even its rainwater - and ultimately to the notorious Cochabamba Water Wars of 2000; perhaps we should start to question the "undue monopolistic powers" of the water companies, and perhaps we ought to question whether this is a model we want to follow for the provision of something as precious as music.

Before I am accused of taking a metaphor too literally, however, let's examine what Kusek and Leonhard actually have to say about music, about the kind of music we might be listening to in this bright future of theirs, and what it might sound like. Precious little, as it turns out. The sound of music seems to be of little concern to these self-styled futurists. In the above-quoted paragraph they offer us some "familiar tune playing softly", a little "hard rock", a touch of "soft dinner jazz," even "some New Age derivatives of Mozart's original compositions," (I particularly like the way they had to point out that Mozart wrote "original compositions" - such a novelty will it be to actually compose in the coming era of endless re-versions, remixes, and derivatives).

They trumpet themselves repeatedly as champions of the "niche", the "emerging", "new music" and "indie labels". All the exciting new marketing tools of the digital age - from video game syncs to corporate sponsorships - are framed as opportunities to smash the prevailing hegemony. And yet, when it comes to providing examples, we are faced with an array of staggeringly familiar names: U2, Blink 182, Sting, Phish ... Hark! What refreshing new sounds be these coming up from the underground? The confluence of the names of all these rock dinosaurs with Leonhard and Kusek's shiny new tools is not merely contingent or coincidental. The fact is, far from breaking the hold of the major labels, opportunities like having your song in the latest EA Sports game are only available to artists already deeply embedded in major label structures.

The authors never tire of chanting how this brave new world will increase the "diversity" of music available to the listener, and yet almost every means they chart to do so will undoubtedly have the opposite effect. They may criticize the traditional radio DJ for following playlists, but at least live radio with live human presenters offers the possibility of a maverick emerging who will bring strange and unusual acts into a sort of mainstream - John Peel being the classic example. On the other hand, expecting diversity to emerge from the algorithms in a web store like Amazon which tells you "people who bought this may also like ..." can only be folly. There is no John Peel algorithm. Such automated software will never surprise you (unless it's broken), only ever offer you the same sounds under different proper nouns.

Futurists have form on this matter. Kusek and Leonhard are not the first to mistake more stuff for enlarged real choice. Back in 1970, Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock, wrote of the "incomparably more diverse" wares to be found in the new supermarkets then fast becoming ubiquitous. Even as Toffler criticised the "architectural sameness" of the supermarkets, he boasted of their "gastronomic diversity" - and even architecturally, he was convinced that, given time, "Uniformity will give way to diversity." As the term "futurist" ceased to refer to a type of artist or political thinker and became a kind of profession in itself, from Toffler's course at The New School to net evangelists like Leonhard and nanotech prophets like Ray Kurzweil, it seems to have necessitated an almost total neglect towards precisely those disciplines in which the future was once most at home: aesthetics and politics.