The telephonic uncanny
In the late 1990s I was living in Tucson, Arizona, which was the very opposite of "connected." I often felt like I was in hiding, or in early retirement. Much of my time was spent reading old novels and playing bridge with my friends. In fact, I was a card-carrying member of the American Contract Bridge League and had earned enough "master points" to be considered a "junior master."
I vividly remember going to a friend's house to play bridge and being astounded that his computer was just on, sitting in the corner of the room. It didn't make sense to me. You turned the computer on when you had some task to perform with it, or to play some game, and you turned it off when you were done. Having it on and idle seemed like a thoughtless waste of power. It wasn't even like a TV, filling the room with an ambient sense of presence. Instead it sat there, occasionally whirring for no apparent reason, an ineffectual poltergeist.
Over shuffling and dealing, I kept asking why he didn't shut it off. He explained immediately that they had just got a dedicated line for their internet connection, and that they didn't have to use a dial-up modem anymore, but I couldn't see what that had to do with anything. And why would you need to be always connected to the internet? My friend didn't really have a reason; his view was more along the lines of why wouldn't you be?
In retrospect, it's clear that the capability of being always connected and taking that for granted was a bigger leap than the mere possibility of having internet access. Things you would never bother to power up your computer for became second nature when the computer was already on and online. Suddenly it made sense to try to download music and video files (a long and arduous process then), or to seek out information to settle arguments or satisfy whims of curiosity that would have been passing but now could open up a pool of informational quicksand, a time-sucking series of endless links.
I was thinking about that night, and the abrupt transition from being disconnected to always connected, because I am reading Erik Davis's 1997 book Techgnosis, which is suffused with the zeitgeist of that time. Written in the run-up to Y2K, it explores how new communications technologies have always generated new ways of sustaining irrational or idiosyncratic ways of perceiving the world. In other words, the internet and other technological developments sustain rather than disenchant mysticism and supernaturalism. It seems weird now to have to make that argument, but there must have been a strong sense then that "scientific breakthroughs" will automatically extend the domain of rationalism, allowing miraculous feats of transmission — talking to people who aren't there, sending your image to the other side of the world, and so on — to appear mundanely explicable.
But as Davis argues at length, the rational explanations merely expand the territory in which new mysteries can spring up; they generate new and unforeseen modes of confusion that seek to be satisfied with any kind of answer. At one point, drawing on Avital Ronell, he labels this phenomenon the telephonic uncanny, a sense of dread and fascination with how communication technology extends, exteriorizes, and doubles the self.
David Lynch's 1997 film Lost Highway has a scene that captures this well, when the "mystery man" played by Robert Blake confronts Fred Madison, Bill Pullman's character, at a party, and they have this conversation:
Mystery Man: We've met before, haven't we.
Fred Madison: I don't think so. Where was it you think we met?
Mystery Man: At your house. Don't you remember?
Fred Madison: No. No, I don't. Are you sure?
Mystery Man: Of course. As a matter of fact, I'm there right now.
Fred Madison: What do you mean? You're where right now?
Mystery Man: At your house.
Fred Madison: That's fucking crazy, man.
Mystery Man: Call me. [Pulls out cell phone] Dial your number. Go ahead.
Naturally, the mystery man then answers the call, and they laugh together, eerily in sync, the cackles coming out of the phone speaker and the person in front of Pullman at the same time.
One could do an entire reading of that film as an exploration of the telephonic uncanny, an examination of how recordings and transmissions put many copies of ourselves in play and fracture our identities accordingly. When I saw it in Tucson when it came out (thrilled that it was actually playing in a theater there), I didn't get it at all. It just seemed boring when it didn't seem incomprehensible. It was the same way I felt in my friend's living room, trying to convince him to turn his computer off.
***
In Davis's view, the telephonic uncanny produces an unwarranted feeling of paranoia, as the doublings and potential duplicities imply vulnerabilities that are impossible to fully ascertain. Communication technology not only extends the self but it provides an avenue for the infiltration of outside forces, in the form of surveillance (if not actual possession). "The mere possibility that unknown and unseen agents are bugging your line," Davis writes, "is enough to puncture the psychological intimacy afforded by a phone call, transforming your humble handset into an insidious tentacle of unwanted and invisible powers."
Davis writes with indeterminate irony about these fears, calling them "one of the great schizophrenic motifs of the 20th century: the conviction that nefarious quasi-telepathic forces are using transistor radios, TVs, dental fillings or microwave signals to colonize brains and manipulate behavior." He regards such fears as "daemonic allegories of media manipulation and modern propaganda" but claims their "essence remains thoroughly occult." Maybe he have the same view about social media and algorithmic filters and targeted advertising, an integrated system that is unambiguously designed to try to "manipulate behavior" and emotions and political values and so on.
In a chapter about UFOs, Davis cites Michael Heim, the coiner of "Alternate World Syndrome," who posited that the 1990s concern with alien intelligence was a recoding of how technology was changing us — we faced our future selves and our anxieties about it in the form of the greys. It may be now that those fears are channelled into a different sort of "alien intelligence": artificial intelligence, algorithmic consciousness, machine learning.
Davis suggests we rely on old myths, archetypes, and magical thinking to try to come to terms with "the now outered electronic self" — that is, the self exposed to new influences and transformative processes by connectivity — "open and exposed to the attentions of those unseen agents who lurk everywhere in information space." We turn to spiritual practices for explanation and protection. Trying to adjust the privacy settings on Facebook should probably be understood that way — a faith-based practice, a form of prayer, a voodoo ritual.
What we need mystical explanation for, perhaps, is not so much the technological capabilities themselves, how wireless transmission manages to work and so on, but the forms of social interconnection they enable. In other words, what is mystifying is not technology but intersubjectivity, how other people inevitably bring uncontrollable currents of influence that are always in the process of reshaping us.
Davis draws on anthropologist Stanley Tambiah's distinction between causality and participation as frameworks for understanding human behavior. "Causality boils down to the pragmatic rationalism of science: the detached individual ego divides and fragments the welter of the world according to objective and explanatory schemes based on neutrality and instrumental action. In contrast, the world of participation plunges the individual into a collective sea that erodes the barrier between human agency and the surrounding environment." These different frameworks co-exist and intermix, contradicting each other in some cases without canceling each other out. One posits a kind of methodological individualism, the other suggests that people create a new reality through the beliefs they hold in common. Davis links that idea to New Age spiritualism, and the belief that we can create our own reality: "New Agers embrace the notion that the frequencies we tune in to actually produce the self and its experience of a specific world. Salvation therefore lies in ... tuning in to positive frequencies and drawing enough fellow minds into the picture to make your world resonate and stick."
That sounds a lot like cults as a transformational technology, but it also offers a way to regard virality. Social media's loops push people through a set of processes that generate and confirm a world view, convening an audience around an idea and substantiating its reality. We seem to make this reality with our choices, but yet it appears for us as if were already out there waiting, along with the ever shifting but always present group of others who seem to share it. Phones saturate our lives with on-demand participation rituals. The consensus reality depends on which app you open.