The 1988 Show
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what we truly desire. Yes, yes, we think. The hologram is our only hope.
But a holographic Tupac performing for us is one thing, yet even a fiill
hologram of a person on the other end of the phone would still be unable
to touch us, interact with us, be with us. What we really desire from our
communications technology is something that could put the person
we’ve dialed up directly in front of us. It’s not Star Wars that holds our
dreams, that is, but Star Trek. What we need is a transporter. A
teleportation device that will instantly make the Other appear in the room
with us when we want to converse; the Other made flesh and blood, fully
present, here rather than there. This, then, is the ultimate trajectory of the
telephone. But notice: what the transporter ultimately does is allow us to
have a face-to-face conversation— which is exactly what we had before
all o f this technology got in between us in the first place. That is, we long
for real, embodied, fleshed out presence. We know it is the only real, and
only really fulfilling, form of communication. Communications
technology thus truly wishes to destroy itself, to overcome itself, to give
us what we had before it arrived on the scene and mediated our
interactions. The dirty secret we have been dancing around is that we are
actually trying to do away with communications technology. This will
never succeed, of course—at least without true revolution. Because if
technology of all kinds gave us what we all truly want—knowledge,
health, well-being, flourishing, and personal face-to-face community—it
would have to do so by virtue of its own non-being. This is the ultimate
paradox that lies at the center of many myths surrounding technology.
And it’s why we might rightly say that Dirty Dancing was the number
one movie of 1988. Because that was the year that the movies got
smaller, the year that watching a film could mean going home to be by
yourself, the year we fell into bad faith and started to accept that we have
no control over the change, the year we let technology treat us like babies
and put us in the comer.
4. Everything Changes . . . Until it Doesn’t
In the end, perhaps the reason we cling to the self—cling to the
hope that we are the still point of the universe around which everything
else dances and changes—is because in the performance of our lives, we
want to think that we are the main characters. Though we have
discovered that it is change itself that founds our identity, we have also
seen that change is value-laden, full of the messy work of ethics and
politics, and though the weight of existence can be heavy, we do not
want to think that there could ever be non-existence.