Juan Villoro
“I wasn’t like that; the gadgets changed me,” confesses a friend. Indeed, twenty years ago, we were all not only younger but different.
Technology provides experiences that once seemed contradictory, if not impossible. One of these is “remote intimacy”. There is much talk about the addictiveness of cell phones and the difficulty of doing without them; however, there are indications that this is more than just a new vice. The neuromarketing company Mindsign, based in San Diego, California, conducted a revealing study with eight women and eight men between the ages of 18 and 25. In that research, the brain areas stimulated by the iPhone showed not the usual patterns of addiction but something more complex: love. In the words of Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy: “Their brains responded in the same way they would to boyfriends, girlfriends, nieces, nephews or pets […] it may not be an addiction in the medical sense, but it is real love.”
This is the premise of the movie Her, where the protagonist falls in love with his operating system. Thanks to algorithms, Samantha, the girl who “inhabits” the phone and speaks with the silky voice of Scarlett Johansson, anticipates the desires of the phone’s owner.
I came into contact with Lindstrom’s ideas thanks to Drone Visions, Naief Yehya’s excellent book on science fiction and cyberpunk cinema. The “big screen” foreshadowed the transformations occurring today on small screens that alter human behavior. Apropos of Her, Yehya writes, “A device that satisfies as many illusory or real needs as the smartphone [represents] a device whose company we find acceptable and sometimes preferable to that of other human beings.” It’s no accident that the iPhone’s competition is eloquently called Android.
Having a true friend is like having a goldfish: the relationship depends on taking care of the fish tank; now and then, you have to wash the pebbles where the filth accumulates. The cell phone responds to demands without asking for anything in return; in the worst case, it has to be reset.
Our affections are increasingly involved with intangible applications and devices that represent us at a distance. In Drone World, Yehya focuses on the new extension of the human gaze: “The word drone came into use in 1946 to refer to an RPV (remotely piloted vehicle) and comes from the noise or buzzing sound that certain models make, evoking or drones.
In my novel The Argon Shot, an ophthalmologist goes blind and uses his disciples as if they were his eyes. He has trained them so rigorously that each one of them is a prosthesis of his gaze. Written before artificial insects took over the sky, the novel deals with “cultural drones”, people who see so that others can.
Today every event is followed by a cloud of eyes. Government offices and other restricted areas protect themselves from the intrusive gaze with drone hunters on rooftops.
The audiovisual media already abuse aerial shots so much that, by mere contrast, photography at ground level looks like “auteur cinema”.
The drone is used to watch but also to send messages; like carrier pigeons, it can carry letters or explosives. Yehya offers a grim picture of the devices that monitor and chase from the sky: “The assassination of General Qasem Soleimani, leader of the elite Quds Force unit, in a US attack with an MQ-9 Reaper drone on January 2, 2020 […] made it clear [that] anyone can now be a potential victim of drone assassination. Anyone can die on a clear day; the unprotected citizen has no help other than rain.
Like the cell phone, drones foster “remote intimacy.” Remoteness is in our hands and allows intense affective reactions.
The flip side of love is hate, and both seek to alter the other. Just as you can love the imaginary subject that animates your phone, you can erase an enemy at a distance as if it were an imaginary subject.
Artificial intelligence does not yet dominate us, but neither do we dominate the feelings we deposit in devices.
This was originally published in Spanish on May 7, 2021, by Reforma.