Paradise Preserved

I want to expand on Shelina's and Rhiannon’s posts to address the specifics of our dependence on computers and the internet. While we often couch conversations of life shifted to the internet in terms of social networking, social interaction is not the only thing that has moved online. My roommate spilled soda on her computer and had to give it up for a week, and no one understood how she was getting work done. Granted, she has the internet on her phone and access to campus computer clusters, but it’s not that much of an exaggeration now for people to think of their personal computers in terms of “my whole life is on that thing.”

I was initially struck by the fact that Case’s disconnect from cyberspace was related to “the Fall,” (6), but I think playing out the metaphor provides some interesting complications to the question of what we stand to lose based on our reliance on computers. For Case, it seems disconnect from cyberspace really does mirror Adam’s own loss of Paradise. Tempted into breaking one big rule he's been given in his world, he loses access to it, in the process becoming hyper aware of the “prison of his own flesh,” and understanding misery and work in a new light for some time (6). From there of course the story changes – he’s granted new access to his personal Paradise and doesn’t lose it this time, and Molly’s not exactly Eve. But this idea of paradise is what I want to dwell on. Because, as Rhiannon noted, the internet can certainly serve as a haven for people. But it’s not paradise, or at least not just paradise. Increasingly, it’s everyday life. It’s where we keep our calendars and photographs, where we learn assignments and hand them in. It’s where we do our taxes, and while it isn’t yet where we perform that other certainty in life, death, that’s not that far away either. Because once your whole life is on that thing, you can lose your whole life on it too. And yes, this doesn’t apply to everyone. I still have a planner that I write things down in, and the technological advancements we have access to are not at all universal. But once we do transfer information to the internet, we become dependent on that information. Apocalypse stories so often center around a disruption in technology at this point because it’s hard to imagine life without technology. It’s hard to live life without technology, but still entirely possible. But the more dependent we are on the world of computers, the more traumatic the loss of that world if it ever occurs. Our own great Fall.

In response to Seth’s post, if we’re considering life lived online, I guess we can consider afterlife as well. The idea of coming back to life recurs throughout the novel, not just in Dixie as disembodied consciousness, but also in cases like the cryonic preservation of the Tessier-Ashpool family. There are a million versions of me on my computer and online – cover letters, creative work, pictures, personal information, everything. They’re not cognizant, but they’re me preserved, frozen in a moment in time and ready to represent me to others when called upon to do so. Facebook pages and other websites can live on even if their owners have died. If we think of Dixie as a projection/ghost, it’s not hard to make a jump to already existing technology. One final note. I've noticed as I wrote that I was repeatedly conflating computers and the internet. I guess it's because life lived and preserved on both so often overlaps.

Reflections on Recall

One prominent theme addressed in “Total Recall” and “We Can Remember it For You Wholesale” is the issue of distinguishing reality from illusions. In attempting to convince Doug to purchase a memory implant, McClane argues that once an event has passed, all that remains are the recollections we have. Indeed, had Doug never visited Rekal, Inc. in “Total Recall”, the memories he had of life on Earth – revolving around his work as a construction worker and his wife – would still be his reality, for he would have never known about or discovered his previous life. But if these apparently fictitious memories are indistinguishable from reality, then why might we still want to determine which is real, and which is not? One possible reason might be because knowing the truth allows us to act as we actually want to, without being unknowingly influenced by others, and this is certainly reflected in Doug’s actions: although Doug knows that going to see Kuatro will endanger both himself and Melina, he does so anyway in order to find out more about his past self, Hauser, and why his memories were erased, so that he can understand why he is being hunted by Cohaagen’s men.

Closely related to Doug’s past self is the question of personal identity, which is more prominent in “Total Recall”. After Doug and Melina are captured, Doug finds out that he will be mindwiped again, with his personality replaced by Hauser’s. Given his dislike of Hauser’s manipulative, egoistic ways, his resistance to being mindwiped seems natural. However, I believe that Doug has a stronger motivation to fight the memory implant than that, as Doug resists the mindwiping attempt as strongly as he would any attempt to kill him. This is most likely because Doug has had first-hand experience with memory implanting, and as he knows that his current memories represent his reality, the loss of his current identity would be equivalent to death.

Interestingly enough, these themes discussed are related to existing philosophical questions. For example, the question of distinguishing reality from delusions has often been explored in skeptic arguments such as the dream argument, while the issue of personal identity has been discussed by Bernard Williams, who imagined a mind swap experiment and a person’s possible responses to being tortured after the mind swap. However, “Total Recall” and “We can Remember it For You Wholesale” do not present these philosophical questions as abstract thought experiments seemingly irrelevant to daily life. Instead, because the story is set in a time where memory-implanting technology has been developed, Doug is forced to confront these questions of reality and personal identity when this technology is used on him, and his response to them suggests to us how ordinary people might behave when placed in such situations as well (although we probably wouldn't be as gratuitously violent as Arnie). Thus although the futuristic setting of these stories is unfamiliar to us, the issues they discuss are not, and this is certainly consistent with Suvin’s definition of science fiction as a “literature of cognitive estrangement” (p. 372), or one which “allows us to recognize the subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (p. 374), suggesting this might be a useful definition to begin examining science fiction texts with.