by Christopher Barr
Transformers: Age of Extinction did not follow its marketing tagline that
states; “The Rules have Changed”, rather it remained a racist, sexist,
homophobic, Michael Bay-hem, hodgepodge of robots smashing robots while
pathetically dull human characters run around and underneath them, screaming
their ungrateful, superficial faces off, to an extreme.
Age of Extinction is a movie
with no people in it, it is a movie where 'man'
in the Michel Foucault sense, is a mere invention, and in the case of
Transformers, a horribly bad one. The archeology of our thinking and the
history of ideas have all been uploaded into computers and have become what
Jean-Francois Lyotard calls "mercantilization"
commodified by corporations, judged on their commercial value and not on their
truth, and they are then sold to us, the naïve, didn’t-know-better consumer.
Technology has become the new
religion, the new source of belief.This movie has manifested its
technology into somewhat relatable robots. One's with eyes and a mouth
for it to speak to us humans from, robots with feelings, and sadly in the case
of this movie, robots with more feelings than the humans they claim to care
about. Other than this being a dreadful movie, we should be alarmed to
say the least about these implications; knowledge has become externalized and
in some cases, weaponized. Our philosophy is no longer searching for
truth within the knowledge we have available to us. It means to package
and sell it, control and censor it in fundamentally diverse and unique ways,
but at what cost? The loss of the human imagination to the uploading of
manufactured ideas, suppressed and delimited by corporations is where the new
world is heading, as we are crop-dusted in saturation and blinded from critical
thought.
“The
intellectual faculty is what separates human beings from other life
forms. It’s associated with higher, distinctly mental processes, such as
reasoning, abstract thinking, knowing, understanding, and also judging,
believing, forming opinions, feeling higher emotions, and deliberating and
choosing.”
-
Aristotle
When knowledge becomes data it
is no longer the undefinable matter of minds, rather it becomes a commodity in
the form of alien robots that have come to earth to save us all, (from
ourselves so it seems) to put us back on the idealized course of good. This robs the mind of deep thought which is
required to construct ideas and create notable discourse. All the great thinkers of the past have the
great thinkers of their past to thank for creating a path for them to walk
along. Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the mental state
of the mind didn’t just come to him; he had influences like Nietzsche and Plato
to thank for his eventual contribution to the mental sciences.
The corporate and governmental
business plan is to maintain a dumbing down, a numbing of the population to
keep control over them. They want them
to remain in the Rousseauian proverb of being, “…born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” These movies are idea absorbers; they paralyze
the mind and tranquilise the will. Their
function is to medicate their viewers into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers sort of state where lethargic
complacency maintains its hold. These
movies reduce the viewers to infancy so dependency on the system is all they
know. This controls the frontier of innovation
so inventions, cures to diseases and political candidates can be monitored and
policed if necessary, so corporate shareholders remain confident with their
investments.
Edward Said says that 'Every empire tells itself and the world
that it is unlike all other empires'. The American empire drinks from
the same well of arrogance. It lives under the illusion that technology
will save us all as long as they control and profit from it. They don't
see as empires before them didn't see, that their superior view of themselves
is the nail in the coffin they didn't think was coming.Transformers is a
story of American arrogance and superiority, a story filled with propaganda
that is selling the image of the great narcissist; I am right and they
are all wrong.
Some fascinating threads that
do weave through Transformers lie in the area of artificial intelligence.
An area of study that asks, "What
does it mean to be alive?" “Can
metal under the right technological circumstances feel pain and or suffering?"
“The question within the context of the
story is; are Transformers living beings? Certainly with their
miraculous capability to change shape as complicated mechanisms, does support
that they are intelligent beings with state of the art technological abilities,
but are they alive, can they die or do they just stop working?
Our machines are heading toward,
and in some cases arrived, becoming thinking things that operate under their
own decision making processes. Robots exist in the real world, thinking
machines that, as they evolve, will become weapons. Drones are manned by
soldiers on military bases so they are not quite autonomous yet, but they soon
will be as the technology advances to the point of robot self-awareness.
Where will their morality come from in the real world, where will their views
on good and evil reside?
Optimus Prime has always maintained a moral responsibility. Kant has stated that if we are going to follow what is right then we should do so universally, in all cases. The Autobots and the Decepticons have been fighting like the Christians and the Muslims for years. They have been fighting so long that I’m sure most can’t even remember what they are really fighting for; they are just fighting for the sack of fearing the Other. Megatron is the fascist that Optimus Prime feels he needs to keep at bay.
The end of Age of Extinction was
quite similar in scope and insanity as the first three; it was loud and
unrelenting with very little pay-off. The Dinobots team up with the Autobots
to save the day. Like the corporate slogan in the movie; the past is history, the present is
past and the future is now, spells a sad day yet again where this form of
Americana sludge can be shilled out to millions of viewers. The corporate
program is well in affect; keep
purchasing to define your life and remain subordinate to those that rule over
us all.
“The sad thing about artificial
intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
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