BAUDELAIRE, BAUDOT, BAUDRILLARD
‘Welcome to the HIVE!’ my client excitedly announced. In this case, the Hive wasn't actually a beehive and we weren’t wearing special beekeeper’s suits or indulging in any form of apiary. HIVE was actually an acronym (how unusual) that stood for Holographic Immersive Virtual Experience. As we stood inside the dark empty cube of the HIVE, my client pressed a button on the remote that she was holding and we were suddenly bathed in the illumination of LCD screens completely surrounding us, to the left and to the right, front and behind, and above and below. We now appeared to be standing in a forest clearing, with sunlight flickering through the branches above us, rippling across the mossy forest floor beneath our feet. Birdsong flooded out all around us, clearly audible above the sound of the breeze as it surfed through the treetops.
Although the breeze sounded authentic, I could not feel it on my face and it wasn’t ruffling my host’s elegantly-coiffed hair. There were none of the expected scents of the forest either, only the lingering antiseptic smells of the cleaning products used on the screens. I couldn’t feel the springy moss under my feet, only the hard armoured glass surface of the floor screens. And as I listened intently to the birdsong, seeking to identify the species involved, I realised that the birdsong was on a short loop, repeated again and again. My host, however, still seemed to be highly immersed in the whole holographic immersive virtual experience.
She turned to me, her eyes gleaming in the virtual sunlight that dappled across her face and announced ‘Now for the piece de resistance‘. It may not have been the most appropriate phrase to use, as it originally meant a piece which has staying power, but as my host clicked the remote, all but one of the screens flickered off, leaving us both looking at a view of the forest that resembled a green tunnel surrounded by blackness, like looking through a telescope the wrong way. ‘Not to worry’, she said confidently, ‘I will just reset the experience’. Despite much button clicking, nothing continued to happen and we continued to look at what remained of the forest as if looking through a letterbox. The light from what remained of the virtual forest now faintly illuminated the rectangular framework of the screen edges, geometrically caging us in.
For some reason, the phrase ‘piece de resistance’ brought to mind the work of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, and one of his pieces which still has staying power today, more than a century and a half later, His work, Tableaux Parisiens, was inspired by his feelings of alienation and disconnection from the rapidly modernising city of Paris. Baudelaire’s experience of the modern geometrically planned streets of Paris was that they were missing some vital human elements that were the real heart of the city. He felt that what had been a vibrant and healthy mix of humanity was now being homogenised into bland identical structures. and this process was excluding many of his fellow Parisians from the city that had once been theirs. From an artistic perspective, Baudelaire originated the term modernity and his work beautifully describes the transition from the romantic to the modern. From the mystical intangibility of the Romantics to the hard-edged rationality of the Modernists.
A couple of his poems from Tableaux Parisien were certainly still relevant as we stood in the geometric modernity of the hive "À celle qui est trop gaie" (or "To Her Who Is Too Joyful") and "Femmes damnées (À la pâle clarté)" (or "Women Doomed (In the pale glimmer...)". My host turned from the letterbox view of the forest scene and offered the classic explanation of a complex infrastructure failure ‘I can only assume that there has been some sort of technical glitch ‘.
For many people, modern computing systems behave in a perfect and rational manner and any faults experienced with them are not actual faults with the system but some mysterious glitch in the matrix. In my experience as a CTO, I realise that the reality is quite different and I was intrigued to understand the nature of the fault. Although my host suggested that we go back to her boardroom, where she could give me a PowerPoint presentation about the HIVE, my suggestion was that we call technical support to troubleshoot the fault so we could continue the whole holographic immersive virtual experience thing and expand the forest from its current bandwidth restricted pillbox view. And from a CTO’s perspective, we might perhaps find out what was behind the wizard’s curtain of all these armoured screens.
My host slid the remote into a pocket and retrieved her phone from another pocket. We had gone from the vast bandwidth required to run the hive back to the basic bandwidth of dial-up. But because of the fact that we were in a giant Faraday Cage clad in opaque mirrors, there was no signal. And due to the seamlessly well fitting of the surrounding screens, neither of us could find the door. It took much button stabbing and shouting on the part of my host, but eventually a crack appeared in the smooth black wall, letting the light in as the technician arrived and opened the door from the outside. He led us out of the HIVE, leaving the letterbox view of the forest retreating behind us like a memory in a rearview mirror. The technician led us through a door, which said ‘DO NOT ENTER’ and then down some industrial stairs, in marked contrast to the plush decor of the offices above. And then through another door, which also emphasised In no uncertain terms that it should not be entered either. And then we were in a large space, with the cube of the HIVE suspended in the middle of it and surrounded by cables snaking and slithering all around it. Our technician plugged his laptop Into an interface and started running diagnostics. After a couple of minutes, he identified the problem as a cable fault, which was reducing bandwidth, meaning we could only see a small part of the forest. The full experience of our Holographic Immersive Virtual Experience was being limited by how much bandwidth was available to us.
A few years after Charles Baudelaire passed away at the end of August 1867, his fellow Frenchman, Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot, invented the first method of digital communication, the Baudot Code, perhaps best known in recent times for the unit of digital transmission that was named after him, the Baud. You may be old enough to remember life before broadband, with dial-up modems, with Baud rates like 56K, 28.8, 14.4.
The ability to transmit information as ones and zeros was a reflection of the shift away from romantic analogue representations of human experience to modern digital representations. In the modern world, there was no room for the intangible, for the subjective, only the objective binaries of yes or no, black or white, one or zero. No cracks in between for the light to get in.
The intangible can often seem like noise, seeming like information of little or no importance, seeming like it is obfuscating the objective signal rather than contextualising it. Many of our definitions, our labels, for what is Pre-Modern, Modern, Postmodern, Metamodern, Supermodern, Hypermodern, and all the various other types of Modernity originate from artistic and philosophical movements, both of which attempt to explain the intangible in the form of the tangible.
Nearly a century after Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot ceased transmitting or receiving in March 1903, the post-modern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard began to document the movement from modernity, the modern, to the post-modern. Baudrillard was not a fan of binary polarisations, such as yes or no, black or white, one or zero. Rather than regressing to a romantic pre-modern perspective, Baudrillard’s view was that there was no difference between fact and fiction, between the original and a copy, between reality and a simulation,
Baudrillard thought that this was a historical progression of civilization, that modern simulations could create a hyperreality with no reference to the original reality. His thinking was that in the romance of the Renaissance, the most prevalent simulation was the counterfeit, in the industrial revolution it was the product, and in contemporary society, the dominant simulation is the model.
All these philosophical wanderings may seem to have little relevance to fixing ‘the glitch’ in the Holographic Immersive Virtual Experience, but as Baudrillard observed, the nature of society is an outcome of the forms of communication employed by that society. If the forms of communication are models that are disconnected from reality, no matter how real they appear to be, then there will be a reduction in a deeper and wider awareness of actual reality.
This is an echo of what Baudelaire described in ‘Flowers of Evil’. The messy complex reality of human life becomes reduced to a bland homogenised idealism. That intentional reduction in self-awareness and situational awareness is what some theologians and philosophers consider to be the definition of evil. That sense of evil is not just a throttling of awareness but also an active disconnection from the past, forgetting about how connections evolved, where our society came from and where our understanding comes from. There is only so much understanding and meaning that can be transmitted down a cable no matter how big that bandwidth pipe is.
As the three of us looked at all those cables, a writhing rhizome of carefully curated interconnectedness, trying to simulate meaningful life in the fake arborescence above it in the HIVE. All that technology, to provide a simulated experience of an alienated reality. A worldview protected by armoured glass, where cracks to let the light in only happen by accident or malfunction.
And as Baudrillard described, when the model becomes a reality, when references and referents become disconnected, with no referees, then it is all too easy to become immersed in all the evils of the post-truth world. Where anything can mean anything else with no connection to actual reality.
As we looked up at the HIVE of inactivity, our technician was gently shaking his head backwards and forwards before shrugging his shoulders and saying ‘I’m afraid it’s the same old issue. We frequently have this problem and it’s going to take a few days to fix. So no immersive visual experiences until then‘.
I suggested to my host that we could have an actual immersive virtual experience right now, a Living Immersive Viable Experience, a LIVE rather than a HIVE. My host seemed both disappointed and relieved, so we made our way back up the hard clanging stairs and echoing concrete walls Until eventually we stepped out of the building into the real sunlight. About a hundred metres away was an actual forest with real trees, so we made our way over there. After walking into the forest for a short while, we found ourselves standing in a forest clearing, with sunlight flickering through the branches above us, rippling across the mossy forest floor beneath our feet. Birdsong flooded out all around us, clearly audible above the sound of the breeze as it surfed through the treetops.
The breeze ruffled my hosts elegantly-coiffed hair and we breathed in the complex scents of the forest. I could feel the springy moss under my feet as I listened intently to the birdsong, seeking to identify the species involved. There was no looping this time, just the familiarity and subtle variations of actual birdsong. As we immersed ourselves in the messy complexities of the natural world, we could sense our awareness becoming wider and wider rather than being narrowed down to a letterbox of perception. It can be very tempting to take a narrow view of human nature and all its complexities. It can be very tempting to try and reduce human experience to ones and zeros, no matter how rich the simulacrum may appear. But evil is never really about temptation, it is usually the outcome of diminishing the richness of human experience.