Pacific Rim and The Singularity

by Christopher Barr

“Technology is a state of culture... state of mind... the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology... its satisfactions... its orders...”

-Neil Postman

Technological mind-melding, man and man, man and machine, these are some of the concepts explored in the blockbuster Pacific Rim.  In the near future, alien monsters from the deepest crevasses of the ocean, specifically the Pacific, make their way through a portal from their world to ours to kill everything in sight and harvest the land for colonization.  These creatures are inducted into the symbolic order with the signifier “Kaiju” assigned to them.  After killing off a massive amount of people and destroying a lot of property, the technologically advanced portions of this planet design and build gigantic robots, after all the current forms of weaponry fail.  These “Jaegers”, are controlled by two to three pilots whose minds are melded to prevent the neurological strain that would befall on only one pilot.  Their goal is simple, kill any Kaiju, whom themselves are genetically-bred weapons, that exit the portal and make way to heavy populated cities.

Their goal also is to meld seamlessly to their technology, edging even closer to a technological singularity.  Where technology surpasses human intelligence, a time in our future it’s believed, that mind and machine will become one before it advances beyond the point of our ability to even understand it.  Exponential speed increases in computers, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will ensure this inevitable growth.   The advancement of the Internet is but a shadow of computation potentiality that awaits mankind as it continues to develop and further technologically. 

Pacific Rim wants their story to be a human one but it isn’t.  It’s human and machine unification, and this unification is celebrated as it was technology that saved the planet from alien occupation, not the human beings “Drifting” inside the robots.  The technology wasn’t available in the 1920’s for instance to build mega-robots to fight mountainous monsters.  It wasn’t spirit and will power that saved humanity.  It was human technology that did. 

Such is the same with Tony Stark and his Iron Man Mark Suits, a machine built by a weapons inventor and all the technological advancements available to a billionaire with unlimited means and a genius brain to work with.

As well as the Bruce Willis, not so good, sometimes creepy, sci-fi movie Surrogates (2009) is similar in the way humans are controlling machines to better them and protect them in some way, in a place where these human beings live in complete isolation and interact through surrogate robots.   Unlike Pacific Rim, they control their robots virtually from home via headsets.

Johnny Depp is set to star in the (2014) film, Transcendence, where he plays a scientist working toward technological singularity, where computers will be able to transcend the human brain.  This sounds like madness in many ways but in some advocating circles, this form of transcendence is looked at as being divine, a way closer to god.

It’s believed by some, and not in the fictional, sci-fi sense, that we will transcend our minds and brains, possibly unloading into a computer and living forever as other machines built self-assembling nanotech that will run this entire world.  Thus providing all the power that is needed in a place where all future machines will be human machines.

This may sound like I’m a stainless steel romantic but I’m not.  I like all that’s organic and subject to Darwinian Evolution.  Like the separation of state and religion, I support using technology to help advance the species but not become one with it. 

First we created God, and then we gave that credit to him, now we have created technology and now we want that very thing to over-take us.  Human beings seem to be obsessed with creating things that can control them.  But yet we are fooled into thinking the opposite is true. 

These are delicate times for humanity, times where we have the intelligence to create a technology that will birth a new age of machines that may not require our assistance to be assembled.  This is already on the contemporary stage in many cases, machines building better machines, human beings participating in technology that will one day make us obsolete.  We are creating a world where we will be no longer necessary.    If we are not careful, it might be the human race being warehoused while a new electronically artificial species takes our place on the top of the food chain.

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White House has Fallen, Olympus down

by Christopher Barr

“In the councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

There is a potential for one to feel a sense of déjà vu this summer at the movie theater.  There is a one, two, punch in the political, military-driven, propaganda movie department, starting with Olympus has Fallen, released the last week of march and then, White House Down, three months later.  Both movies tell the tale of one military-trained man against a small army of ‘terrorists’ hell bent on global power, retribution and money.  With the President of the United States and his house under siege, it’s up to this savior to rescue the Prez and his house from annihilation.  Not because he is ordered by his superiors but because he must as a countryman.

In the end, the hero saves the President and the world from the evil terrorists, restoring hope back into a wounded government.  In other words, letting the people know that they got this under control.

……..then you walk out of the theatre and back into the World.

Do both of these embarrassingly similar movies want to teach their audiences that America cleans up their own mess, with style and lots of cool explosions?  Is it on a basic level that good will always triumph over evil?  Or is it possible they want us to support how tactically America gets their shit done using the mega-powerful, military-industrial complex?

These movies use God and Country to tell their stories.  They want to pound into the minds of the people that Christianity and their ‘machinery of violence’ is one in the same, propagating the faith and National Security policies as one.  The motives of the government align with these Christian beliefs and are defined through their value systems.  Unconditional patriotism is what’s expected from every American citizen, without question.

Anti-war activism is not tolerated in the US.  One must support all decisions made by the Commander and Chief.  One must not question these decisions as that would be unpatriotic and in some cases, an act of treason.  Despite Thomas Paine’s timely statement; ‘The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government’, a United States citizens duty now is obedience.

America’s goal is full spectrum dominance over all its land, its information systems as it democratizes the rest of the world, as it enlists its military and its geo-political power to fight and persevere over all its enemies, foreign and domestic.  In order to control world markets, world resources, the government must seize all democratic freedoms and social justices, consolidate its power to a small hand full of the Global elite and destroy civil liberties and basic human rights.  It also must evoke constitutional suspensions and rewritten amendments, as it is attempting to do with the US 2^nd amendment, by disarming the people and pushing firmly on their Agenda 21, One World Government.  

The September 11, 2001 false flag attacks on New York City, was the justification the government needed to rewrite whatever it wanted to pursue its Totalitarian goal of global power and population control.  In her 1951 book, ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’, Political Philosopher Hannah Arendt writes it’s “never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from with in.”

Political propaganda is on all the major media news stations in the United States, disseminating public relations stories and policy agendas for the Wall Street White House and its corporate sponsors, with the CIA placed at most News Corporations as government, mind-control liaisons, content adjusters and crisis management advisors.

“The high office of the President has been used to foment a plot to destroy the American’s freedom and before I leave office, I must inform the citizens of this plight.”

-President Kennedy was assassinated on the 22^nd of November, 1963, ten days after he made this speech to Columbia University on Nov.12, 1963.

America is a business.  America is in the war business.  The manufacturing of weapons for use on created enemies that have been falsely accused of infringing on America’s freedom, depicting a homeland in imminent danger.  The profit of which is in the multi billions.  Former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger knew that “who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls the money can control the world."  This is the seed behind America being the World’s leading purveyor of global and state terrorism.  Targeting assassinations on its own citizens and waging decade long wars with oil nations, leaving such nations with a destroyed way of life, an understandable hatred toward the west and all its squandering and elitism.  Thus creating real enemies where there were none before.  Launching the World into a possible nuclear war where the very nation that precipitated this act of terror could very well fall victim to their own creation. 

But this Corporate-run society sees its profits as motivation to forge on into darkness.  Losing many of the tenets its forefathers instilled on their journey to create a nation of free men (and later women), free from tyranny and oppression.

When American’s can only see government heroics on the movie screen, as one man, even in recurrence, can save the leader of the free world and the monumental house he resides in, and then are subject to disinformation via news propaganda on their TV screens, this doesn’t leave much hope for a nation that doesn’t deserve this kind of injustice after all it fought for in the first place.

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