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The Empire Never Ended, in a nutshell, to lift PKD's final gnosis.
His view was that we live in the vestiges of the Roman Empire, and I'm inclined to agree - we live in a gestalt system that receives its symbol-set from the earliest empire builders, and we are mostly oblivious to our inherited reality. We just accept it.
Reality is a fungible concept, as he describes - you can exchange one fixed set of givens for another without changing basic reality one jot, but such can drastically alter perceived reality.
PKD would argue that the President of the United States is not real - that the United States is not real - that there is no quantifiable "UnitedStatesness" about the latter and that the former is only so because we define him as so, and therefore, neither actually exist. We just collectively agree they do.
His prime argument always arced back to that which so appealed to Baudrillard - that we have exchange the real for symbols of the real, that we have exchanged reality for a representation of reality - a map so perfect that it is indistinguishable from that it describes - yet all of our actions are constrained to the map, not to actual reality.
Today, we disappear farther and farther up our own reality-hole, as we entrain and develop systems to further codify and divorce reality from itself - e.g. computers and the internet - the more we represent and perceive the representation as real, the less the real pertains to the reality we perceive.
It's really hard to break out, but not impossible - but you have to see the Black Iron Prison first through gnosis, and it's then purely a mental process.
Reading list: PKD's entire corpus - his non-SF novels ply the same waters - but the novels listed in the article are a good starting point. VALIS is where you go once you're prepared to have your mind melted and reformed.
Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra
Vonnegut's Galapagos
Anyway. Time for me to go stare at the pink laser beam.
Seconding Baudrillard. His analysis of hyperreality, and how we respond to hyperreality, even though it doesn’t really exist and has no effect on reality (which it is imitating) is really tragic.
> the more we represent and perceive the representation as real, the less the real pertains to the reality we perceive.
Does this comment imply that if we removed the Roman Empire vestiges, and removed computers and the internet ...
Does this comment imply that people who lived before all that had a more real reality, or at least a more real perception of reality?
Or am I safe to assume that folk of yore were plagued by their own mythology. And so it was since time immemorial, and so it shall be forever forward.
We’ve been mystics, building false realities in which to inhabit (gods, daemons, myths and legends) since we had the cognitive capacity to do so.
I find it exciting. We each have within our heads the ability to sculpt reality not just for ourselves but for the human world as a whole. We just tend to imagine bad realities - vengeful gods, despotic dictatorships, the dangerous and unknown “other”.
Valis is great, but in terms of general atmosphere and the final (or not so final) revelation Ubik is definitely a better choice, in spite of a spoiler in the article.
Do you have something concrete in mind when you refer to gnosis (akin to mystery school methods)?
A couple of links:
"Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans" by Stanislaw Lem: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/5/lem5art.htm
"Radical Detours - A Situationist Reading of Philip K. Dick", a master's thesis by Andrew Raba: http://researcharchive.vuw.ac.nz/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1006...
Although speaking of Lem, at one point Dick thought he was “probably a composite committee rather than an individual”:
http://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is-...
Yet again, isn't Dicks' larger point that each and everyone of us are a composite committee to some degree?
> Yet the door to Joe’s apartment—which argues with him and refuses to open because he has not paid it the obligatory tip—sounds ominously plausible. Someone, somewhere, is pitching this as a viable business plan to Y Combinator or the venture capitalists in Menlo Park.
And that's the sad reality. When we look at what the Internet has become, who did it that way - it's us, developers working for small and large companies, driven by profit, and willing sacrifice a thing or two on the way. And, there is no way back.
Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all.
Yeah, I greatly admire works that can show a diverse ecology instead of trying to say that an entire world is controlled by a single entity. It just feels stale.
Kim Stanley Robinson (who wrote his PHD thesis on Dick's works [0]) is really good at building an ecology of interesting elements that interact and create complexity.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Novels-Philip-Studies-Speculative-Fic...
Any recommendation of where to start with his books?
His latest, New York: 2140 is pretty dang great. Its a stand-alone novel with well developed characters set in a super-Venice New York.
Neal Stephenson also has excellent worlds. The Diamond Age is my favorite.
You could try the Mars trilogy.
Speaking of, I was quite disappointed with the new "Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams" show, now on Amazon. They are decidedly not faithful to the short stories they're based on, and in several cases choose a conclusion that is diametrically opposite to what PKD intended.
In "Impossible Planet" they go for a weirdly romantic ending that is the opposite of the story, and turns it into some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy.
"Autofac" starts great, but then introduces a twist that makes no sense. Dick's story is extremely dark (taking the automatic, unstoppable factory idea to its logical next step), and the final ending essentially makes the whole premise pointless, turning a smart comment on runaway consumerism and automation into a cheap thriller about love conquering all.
Film adaptations have generally been unable to make something faithful to PKD. I just wish someone would have the balls to do it, because it could be fantastic.
See, I had a very different reading of the end of the Impossible Planet. The old lady and the guy died but in their dying brains they finally "went to Earth", the imperfectly remembered yet angelic place of her rose tinted memories.
The one I didn't like was the one where the smartphone helpdesk gaslights the teenager. I'm willing to suspend disbelief a bit that the teenager won't recognise what's happening, but the end didn't work. She should have died! Every day that she's alive is another day where she might talk about her experience and have someone else go "Wait, that doesn't make sense..." Instead she's doing presentations and inviting people to hear her story!
My only minor quibble is that the ending is a little too easy to guess on most of them. The Lesbian Space Cop/Distraught CEO episode was the best for this, it kept you guessing for a right long time.
Yeah, but in the short story the dead planet actually was earth - ends with him finding a copper disk and going “e pluribus unum? What does that mean?” before throwing it away and getting back on ship. Very definitely not the same as the garbage TV series.
I recommend reading the short stories - the series absolutely lost the meaning of every single one of them.
Although they were developed (and some directed) by Moore and Dinner, who seem to have some artistic control, and the US and UK production staff also seem to be consistent (to maintain the look?), they're all different. Since the writers change every episode I wouldn't expect more than half to really be "faithful" to Dick. I'm not sure he'd appreciate fidelity, but I agree the writing could be better (I like that it's not consistently _Dark_ like a _Mirror_ clone). Maybe I'm jist not a DickHead, but I didn't find all of his original shorts great (or necessarily original).
Fidelity to the plot isn't paramount, but I'd want fidelity to the essence of the story. Both were violated in the aforementioned episodes.
It's worth pointing out that Dick's stories are dark. Autofac has one of the most apocalyptically pessimistic endings ever written (though his seminal "Second Variety" manages to be even darker). I can't think of many that are in some way uplifting. Most of his best stories — "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon", "Impostor", "The Electric Ant", "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts", "Second Variety", "Explorers We" and "Colony", to name a few — are end on a dark, often depressing note. Of the few classics that aren't, such as "Paycheck" and "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale", would probably not lend themselves to Black Mirror-style stories, although I'd love to see faithful adaptations of these. (By the way, if you don't find these stories great or original, I don't know what to tell you. They are masterpieces!)
If the producers didn't want dark stories, it's strange that they would choose Philip K. Dick.
PKD very much liked what he saw of Blade Runner though:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/09/blade-runner-will-prove...
I'm not sure what the purpose of faithful adaptations is really. Better to capture the spirit of the original and make something new (something the new Amazon series doesn't do either as it totally lacks the emotional/somewhat mystical side of PKDs writing).
PKD only saw a 20-minute effects reel set to some pre-existing Vangelis music that they liked, not any assembled scenes. He was amazed by it, but it's worth pointing out that he did not like the script, and disagreed with most of the changes.
Blade Runner is the rare adaptation that is pretty faithful to the essence of the original material (which is what you'd hope for), although by making Deckard a replicant it changes the point of the novel, which is to show a man's disillusionment with a world that has become itself an illusion, a fake reality that lacks meaning. The androids in DADOES are sociopaths who can't feel anything, whereas the film portrays them as full of empathy and deserving of love. The film turns it into a story about a hunter who learns how he's wrong to hunt brings that can feel as much as he does, which is an altogether different and rather more mundane concept than what the novel strives to tell us.
"In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia."
Reminds me of the recent Hawaii false missile alert.
TL;DR — Phillip K. Dick's writing anticipated fake news.
:P
Alright, that's too much of a simplification, and the article is worth a read—but I'd warn that it's plagued by the annoying (and all too common) use of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory' or other more appropriate options, which magically makes all kinds of statements sound more interesting than they really are.
> ... Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.”
Now imagine if instead it were simply said that, "the media, governments, big corporations, religious groups, and political groups attempt to conceal the truth and tell their own versions instead."
The term 'reality' is kind of useful because 'creating a reality' isn't quite a simple as telling a lie, since it's more like a network of lies used to present an alternate account of the state of things. But, it also carries with it the implication that there isn't any objective reality, and that when a political group 'creates a new reality', that it is somehow ontologically equivalent to any other 'reality' available.
I know this is kind of a side rant, but seriously, I can't wait for the day when it's no longer socially acceptable to talk about 'constructing reality' in random contexts, whether the reader is aware of its particular meaning (it's jargon from Sociology and spread to other areas) or not. I can just imagine how it would have felt to read the article if I didn't happen to know the origin of that phrase ('social construction of reality')—it would seem mostly coherent and would appear to be talking about something of the utmost significance, and yet with some kind of vagueness I couldn't quite place (that's my recollection of running into it years ago).
I enjoyed both the piece and your comment. I might be somewhat preloaded (both parents sociologists), but the Boston Review might be right to assume that their readers have some background or at least interest in philosophy, sociology, political discours etc.
And isn't reality even a somewhat bigger term than you describe, in that (loosely: post-modern) reality is always subjective. Your drilling down ("Now imagine ...") still suggests A truth, while for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.
Hey wjnc. That's actually part of the problem I have with it. When you say:
> ...for me 'constructing reality' really drives home that reality is subjective, a construct.
That is a large part of why I take issue with the phrase: the idea that 'reality is subjective, a construct' is one philosophical stance, but by no means the only one possible (afaik, it's quite uncommon for those outside the humanities and certain social sciences to believe this), so it's problematic to have it assumed as true, and to encode that assumption subtly into the language you're using (it's a phrase made up of common words, so unless you're familiar with it, you won't know it has a special meaning).
While I do understand you rant, note that in the context of Dick's novels what is constructed is actual reality, so this use of the term definitely makes sense here. Dick's characters move in a world where the boundaries between real and unreal have been blurred to the point nobody can be sure anymore of which is which.
"Concealing the truth" is a particularly bad substitute for the concept. Creating worldviews might be a better one. But consider that there are even in our world actual realities that are social constructs. Think of social media. Facebook is real, has a part in our lives and what happens in it has real impacts on us; in turn this relevance is determined by the socially agreed value we attribute to it. At its most basic level, because of a network effect: it's real because it's used, and it's used because people think it's used.
> ...note that in the context of Dick's novels what is constructed is actual reality
My understanding is that he used that as a metaphor for getting at this social construction of reality idea.
Additionally, I take no issue with Dick's usage of 'reality'; I have an issue with the article's.
> But consider that there are even in our world actual realities that are social constructs. Think of social media.
Social constructs are real—agreed. However, that is a very different statement from 'alternate realities are socially constructed' or even that a single reality is 'socially constructed,' even granting the reality of social constructs.
The origin is this book: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_R...
It's probably fair to say that PKD would have found ideas like "consensus reality" (Charles Tart) or "reality tunnels" (Timothy Leary) to be, at least, relevant to his work.
I found this article helpful in sketching the developments that you seem to be objecting to: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame...
Yep, my understanding is also that Berger and Luckmann is the source of the phrase.
That looks like an interesting article—I'll check it out.
Here's another (shorter) one that deals with the issue: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/11/post-truth-spawn... (There's a very brief summary in the section "The truth about post-truth")
I would argue that you are missing a beat, insofar as he’s not so much about constructionism (although he was about that, too) as a level below that.
There’s social construction in the format of group consensus and shared narrative, but the “reality” PKD typically picks at is much more basic and fundamental - your perception, your symbol set, your very humanness defining your experience of “objective reality”. He thought that “objective reality” was absolutely inseparable from our perception, that we build a gestalt from fragmented chaos, and that that process can break down. Dick has characters in total isolation lose reality not through divergence with social norms, rather through their perception undergoing some shift - it’s no coincidence that he was into disassociative psychedelics.
The article, if anything, misunderstands Dick, as one of the fundamental aspects of his worlds is that more often than not the problem is the protagonist, who is blind to their own corrosive effects on reality, rather than reality being controlled by sinister entities with purpose and direction.
All of these so-called “realities” (I do agree with you on that aspect) are simulacra, mounted atop a further simulacra, ultimately possibly (Bostrom among others has dented my confidence in “probably”) mounted upon some physical base reality.
But it’s equally likely that we’re a Boltzmann brain having one hell of a hallucination - and that’s far closer to PKD’s ultimate truths than anything as mundane as manufactured “realities”.
Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation was directly inspired by PKD’s work, and explores his notions in quite some detail. It’s a light read, and I highly recommend it.
> use of 'reality' in place of 'belief' or 'theory'
Which was of course a fundamental subject explored by PKD.
Most disappointingly, the Amazon Man in the High Castle adaptation tossed all of that overboard (though it was the primary theme of the book) in favor of the frisson of Nazi porn.
Not sure how much of it you’ve seen, as while it does diverge substantially from the book, it does go off down a belief-powers reality route.
You seem very sure that reality has a precise definition that everyone agrees on.
> the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.
People love a good story and Philip K. Dick knows this well, he writes stories to convey these thoughts through fake realities. Entertaining stories, movies, narratives and 'fake news' essentially, simplifies the world into a good/bad structure and let's you in on the good side. People love a tub of confirmation bias to bask in.
It is the same situation as to why good news doesn't end up on the nightly news. Good news can make people feel worse. Watch HGTV for a while then look at your house and you can't help but feel less than, same with too much good news.
People like a story, stories sell, facts and the entropy of existentialism is too much for some people all the time or many. Same reason religion exists, it is a simplification that allows people to be 'good' and frees up mindspace to think about less jarring things.
Whether the story is lying and fake or entertainment, people like it because life can take you into areas that are reality which is messy and sometimes completely out of your control, a good story is a gift.
America and the world, could also be going through a Hypernormalisation moment. [1]
At those who scroll the comments first, this was well worth the ten minutes to read. I don't think I've wrapped my head around all the ideas enough to summarize it yet. But it really describes everything I love about the medium of scifi.
I just wanted to second this - it is def. worth the short time to read.
I decided to finally read "Do Androids..." after watching Blade Runner 2049 and have tried reading some of Dick's other work. It is a weird discrepancy between the low quality of writing and high quality of thinking.
This essay will give you the reasons why Dick is worth reading; maybe you haven't read any yet, or maybe you can't explain (to yourself or others) why you think he was worth reading.
Either way, my time was well spent.
His writing is generally awful, but his thoughts are (no qualification) the most profound I've ever encountered in print - and I've read quite a bit over the years. His short stories are also really worth-while, from his campy early stuff through to his later stuff - there's a vein of "what is reality" throughout, and they provide a relatively soft landing into his worlds.
I've read ~15 of Dick's novels over the past 20 years, and _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ is among my least favorite, despite the excellent movies based on it. This past year I finally read one of his books that awed me without leaving a sour taste re: character development, lackluster ending, etc.: _The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch_. Nonetheless, despite his novels' shortcomings, I have thoroughly enjoyed many of them.
As a side note I was really disappointed in Blade Runner 2049. The script seems to lack completely that dark feeling of confusion and uncertainty of the original movie. Actually, a lot in it seems to be built around rigid dichotomies: humans and replicants, good and evil, physical and virtual. While in the original replicants were heralds of a new synthetic reality replacing the current one (and the final doubt about the nature of Deckard showed that it was already impossible to tell the one from the other), in the sequel all is reduced to a fight between opposing factions, as if the problem was "who is gonna win in the end?".
This is why I scroll the comments first!
Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.
Oh? That's what legal marijuana legalization is for.
Marijuana (as well as serotonergic psychedelics) generally makes people feel more united and similar in the positive sense, I don't know about any credible studies that would confirm this (although there probably are some) but I really doubt it can promote social hierarchization. Cocaine and alcohol, however, are known to stimulate aggressive-dominant behavior in individuals prone to it though cocaine will surely not stimulate obedience, it will stimulate people to resist propaganda/populism/nonsense and question more. The only well-known psychoactive substance that makes masses easier to manipulate is booze.
The opioid crisis is probably a more apt analogy, given its class dimensions and origination in the pharmaceutical industy. But see also corporate algorithms commodifying all social interaction into "followers" and "likes" as a way to reinforce hierarchy.
On reading that quote, I immediately wondered if Farrell drank his coffee before going out to vote in the American presidential election.
A less snidey thought is that humans always use various psychoactives for all kinds of social and asocial purposes.
Thank you. Finally there's someone else who sees this.
That's what FB is for.
We definitely have but it definitely isn't from legalized marijuana.
Not a very accurate opinion you have but I guess you're entitled to it