Core Post #3 (Sebastian)

    For the “keywords” assignment during the first day of class, my partner, Marissa, and I selected “code/software/OS,” the keywords that unite the readings for this week. More specifically, we spent quite a lot of time discussing how Hollywood films – including The Matrix (The Wachowskis, US/Australia 1999) and Ready Player One (Spielberg, US 2018) – frame the relationship between users and code/software/OS. In “On ‘Sourcery,’ or Code as Fetish,” Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes, “The reduction of computer to source code, combined with the belief that users run our computers, makes us vulnerable to fantastic tales of the power of computing” (300). At first glance, these two films would appear to be nothing if not further examples of these “fantastic tales.” In Ready Player One, the protagonists spend much of their time in “the OASIS,” a massive and profoundly immersive VR world where they can live out adventures that are far more exciting than their drab, dystopic reality. In The Matrix, a similar VR simulation is revealed to be the true dystopia. Nevertheless, by plugging into the titular matrix, the protagonists gain the ability to “download” new skills, such as kung fu or helicopter piloting. Although the films diverge greatly in terms of style, theme, and ideology (The Matrix gestures towards ostensibly radical left wing politics whereas Ready Player One’s nostalgia-soaked aesthetic is decidedly reactionary), both ultimately indulge in a fantasy wherein human mastery of code/software/OS allows for the seemingly magical to occur, i.e., a bored office worker can become a gravity-defying action hero, or an impoverished teen can become an intrepid adventurer on a daring quest. Of course, as Adrian Mackenzie notes in “The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation,” code/software/OS has often been historically framed and advertised as technology “by men for men who like to play with computing hardware” (87). Suffice it to say, both The Matrix and Ready Player One – especially the latter – present a very male-dominated vision of this kind of technological mastery.

    Beyond critiquing the gendered assumptions inherent to these “fantastic tales,” it might also be worthwhile to critically consider how these films deal with the ideological underpinnings of code/software/OS. In “Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software as Ideology,” Alexander R. Galloway writes of software, “It is representation as mathematical recoding, not as any socially or culturally significant process of figuration, yet at the end of the day what emerges is exactly that” (329). Not only are code, software, and OS themselves ideological sites, but the way in which they act is also ideological. Chun contends, “Code does not always nor automatically do what it says, but does so in a crafty manner” (306). Although Galloway and Chun do diverge on some key points, they share the same basic concern about the way that our relationship with code/software/OS obfuscates its ideological dimensions. This made me wonder: Do either The Matrix or Ready Player One actually engage with these critiques, or do both films enact a purely celebratory depiction of the user’s relationship with code/software/OS?

    In Ready Player One, the protagonists ultimately determine that constant immersion in the OASIS may not be the healthiest lifestyle for the users. As such, after they are granted control of the virtual world, they decide to shut if off every Tuesday and Thursday so that the users can spend more time appreciating the “real world.” But this decision is not framed as a critique of the OASIS; the problem is not with the virtual reality’s code/software/OS but with the fact that users might become overly addicted to the power it grants them. Rather than deconstruct the notion that the user is all powerful or that the code is absolute, the film further valorizes those ideas. Meanwhile, The Matrix concludes with the protagonist, Neo, learning to see the code that forms the virtual reality all around him. In a sense, this mirrors Chun’s call for transparency as a way to counteract the obfuscation that tends to surround code. She writes, 

[T]he fact that the code allegedly driving an interface can be revealed, the fact that source

code exists means that the truth is out there. To know the code is to have a form of ‘X-ray’ vision that makes the inside and outside coincide, and the act of revealing sources or connections becomes a critical act in and of itself. (316)

By the end of The Matrix, Neo has adopted this “‘X-ray’ vision” and engaged in the “critical act” of reading the code as it is enacted. But the film’s critique of code’s embedded ideology is only partial. While Neo can see and decipher the matrix’s code, it remains an illegible series of green symbols to the audience. In other words, the spectator is made aware that this “critical act” is possible, but the film does not give them the tools to engage in the act themselves. Moreover, this ability to see the ideological infrastructure that traps people in the matrix is not humbling or disquieting for Neo; instead, it is an opportunity for him to gain new superpowers via greater mastery of the code. Even as The Matrix arguably engages in a critique of code’s embedded ideology, it – like Ready Player One – does not challenge the notion that users who have mastery over this technology are borderline magical.

    The Matrix and Ready Player One are but two of many, many films that deal with similar subject matter (during our Week 1 “keywords” discussion, Marissa also mentioned Source Code (Jones, US/France 2011), for instance). I bring them up primarily because they illustrate how extremely mainstream works of popular culture disseminate some of the same ideas about code/software/OS with which the readings for this week grapple. Furthermore, although its critique of code may be limited and incomplete, the possibilities opened up by The Matrix make me wonder what a film that more fully embraced these alternatives might look like. Or, to put it another way, what would it look like if a work of cinema – mainstream or otherwise – embraced Kara Keeling’s call in “Queer OS” to “[make] perceptible presently uncommon senses in the interest of producing a/new commons and/or of proliferating the senses of a commons already in the making”? (153). In her article, Keeling draws on Chun’s interpretation of Robot Stories (Pak, US 2003) to suggest that this may be one film that takes up the call of “Queer OS.” She writes, “In Chun’s description of [director Greg] Pak’s methodology, Queer OS can be grasped as a malfunction within technologies that secure ‘robot’ and ‘human,’ a malfunction with a capacity to reorder things” (Keeling 157). In direct contrast to The Matrix and Ready Player One, how else might films enact such a “malfunction” so as to “reorder things”? What filmic techniques and narrative devices might adequately reflect both the skepticism of Chun's and Galloway's articles and the tentative optimism of Keeling's article regarding code/software/OS?