J.G. Ballard predicted the rise of social media (2016) | Hacker News Reader

J.G. Ballard predicted the rise of social media (2016)

openculture.com

123 pointsecliptik55 comments

I love this quote:

Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.

Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.

Jerry Seinfeld once did an episode of "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" where he showed the edited version of the day he spent with Bob Enstein and the unedited version. It was incredible to me how mundane and boring the unedited version was compared to the brilliant edited version. That was the point Seinfeld was trying to make. We live in a world a world of make believe.

>We live in a world a world of make believe

Closer to we live in the world of simulacra and simulation. We see this edited version everywhere, think how actors look in TV, how makeup looks in magazines, how people behave in youtube videos.... then we collectively become that.

My friends and family appreciate when I use language they can understand so it's a habit I've gotten into, but I do appreciate your distinction

In case you didn't know, simulacra and simulation is a book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

“My friends and family don’t care for fancy words.”

“No, you see, it’s actually Baudrillard”

This is a neat distillation of a certain type of stereotypic HN exchange.

No stereotypic HN exchange would be complete without a meta comment about the comments

As layers of metas accrete, the original reality recedes into the distance, becoming simulacrum.

Larry: Simulate crumbs? Let them eat bread!

Jerry: What do you care if I eat crumbs?

“These simulacra crumbs are making me thirsty!”

Simulacrumbs

> Marx’s famous introduction to the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—that history happens twice, first as tragedy, then as a farce—has become something of a leitmotif in the works of artists, cultural critics and journalists grappling with the absurd elements of political agitation in the 21st century. Notably, Hal Foster poses the question “What comes after farce?” in his 2020 book of the same name; a book cataloguing contemporary art responses to existence in the Trump era. However, with its renewed appeal, and with support from numerous textual and visual examples, a new addendum has emerged: LARP comes after farce.

> The notion that LARP historically emerges after farce is incapsulated in a quote found within A.M Gittlitz’s biography of Homero Cristalli, better known as J. Posadas.

>> “What we on the Left flatter ourselves in calling our political and even our revolutionary work is in fact nothing of the sort. It is more akin to religious ritual. Mass rallies, newspaper sales, endless meetings, electoral campaigning, street fighting, writing articles that no one will ever read and books absolutely no one will ever get any practical use out of … In another time, in another place, these rituals may have had a relationship to a broader movement, a broader strategy, and such stirrings have always accompanied revolutionary moments. And so, having no real conception of the thing itself, we try to grasp at revolution by playing out its inessential weirdnesses ad nauseam. This is what comes after farce. This is LARP.”

LARP Politics and Hyperreality

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40279820

Did the edited version create jokes they weren't in the unedited?

Or did it just skip over the unfunny parts of a day?

No new material in the edited version. They cut out the unfunny/uninteresting parts

I wonder how many minutes (seconds?) would make the cut if they did the same with all episodes of Seinfeld

We need a browser add-on which does that to Youtube videos.

The future may be AI generated blithering which is then removed by AI summarizers.

I strongly recommend picking up a physical copy of The Complete Stories of JG Ballard [0]. Great to read through from time to time. Every story is weird and a little depressing, though, so don't read too many at once.

[0] https://archive.org/details/completestorieso00ball

I second this. I don't know anything about his life. But after reading his stories chronologically he must have gone through some shit. There is definitely a certain development in them.

Much recommended though.

I always recommend his short story "Report On An Unidentified Space Station":

https://sseh.uchicago.edu/doc/roauss.htm

Ballard, like William Gibson, is one of those people that despite having zero technical know how, seems to intuitively understand how people interface with technology.

Crash is often seen as completely outlandish, but it's hard to see echoes of Robert Vaughan in today's culture. We watch A24's Civil War the same way that Vaughan and Ballard would watch a car crash.

Gibson's "Burning Chrome" casually predicts lifestreaming ("simstim"). We don't have the sci-fi tech, but as a social phenomenon it's exactly Instagram, parts of Twitch, etc.

Also Idoru. AI Virtual celebrity Popstar.

You say zero technical know how, but Ballard spent some of his formative years making his way in a Japanese prison camp in China. If you believe the novel (Empire of the Sun), part of his survival was attributed to combinations of a way with language, people, and youthful endurance. But the backdrop was very much technical know how - working to obtain increasingly scarce necessities, like shoes, and observing first hand the impacts of lack thereof. So while his engineering expertise may not have been elevated from a theoretical perspective, it certainly was deeply and personally grounded in urgent, first hand, experiential concern - and all of this across three languages or more - perhaps a perfect raw humanist basis for the exploration of technology through literature?

That's a good point. I meant "technical" in the narrow sense of working with modern or cutting edge technology. For example, to my knowlege he was not an avid or early user of the internet, yet he seems to have a good sense of the effect it has on us. Technologists are constantly trying to predict the future but the humanists usually hit closer to the mark.

> We watch A24's Civil War the same way that Vaughan and Ballard would watch a car crash.

Civil War was a very interesting movie. The three main characters are all photographers, and the movie turns them into both the observer and the observed. This creates a distancing effect when we are confronted with the violence of war. But the movie also challenges the way we interact with war movies as a genre (many critics picked up on the Full Metal Jacket call-outs, they were so obvious).

I'm just saying, a lot to unpack in that movie.

Fellow British dystopian futurist John Brunner sort of did this in Stand on Zanzibar. Though now that I re-read it, it almost seems like VR, or rather the proxy-interactivity of VR, crossed with the filter bubble of social media:

  MR. & MRS. EVERYWHERE: CALYPSO

  "Like the good Lord God in the Valley of Bones
  Engrelay Satelserv made some people called Jones.
  They were not alive and they were not dead -
  They were ee-magi-nary but always ahead.
  What was remarkably and uniquely new -
  A gadget on the set made them look like you!

  "Watching their sets in a kind of a trance
  Were people in Mexico, people in France.
  They don't chase Jones but the dreams are the same
  Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, that's the right name!
  Herr und Frau Uberall or les Partout,
  A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

  "You can't see all the places of interest,
  Go to the Moon and climb Mount Everest,
  So you stay at home in a comfortable chair
  And rely on Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere!
  Doing all the various things you would like to do,
  A gadget on the set makes them look like you.

  "Wearing parkas and boots made by Gondola
  You see them on an expedition polar.
  They're sunning on the beach at Martinique
  Using lotion from Guinevere Steel's Beautique.
  Whether you're red, white, black or blue
  A gadget on the set makes them look like you!

  "When the Everywhere couple crack a joke
  It's laughed at by all right-thinking folk.
  When the Everywhere couple adopt a pose
  It's the with-it view as everyone knows.
  It may be a rumour or it may be true
  But a gadget on the set has it said by you!

  "English Language Relay Satellite Service
  Didn't do this without any purpose.
  They know very well what they would like -
  A thousand million people all thinking alike.
  When someone says something you don't ask who -
  A gadget on the set has it said by you!

  "'What do you think about Yatakang?'
  'I think the same as the Everywhere gang.'
  'What do you think of Beninia then?'
  'The Everywheres will tell me but I don't know when.'
  Whatever my country and whatever my name
  A gadget on the set makes me think the same."

>Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.

Tangentially related but I've watched the film La Terra Trema (1948) recently. It was made post WW2, shot in one of the poorest region of Italy. The most interesting thing about the film that 1, everything was shot on location 2, all characters were played by locals, all amateur actors 3, we don't know which scenes are staged or real (documentary).

And everything works. I never felt that I was watching amateur actors. Yes it's an old film but still more fresh than anything you see nowadays. And made me think that is it even possible to shoot a film like that today? We are all "poisoned" by TV, internet, social media, even radio. Would we able to act naturally at all? Probably impossible to do a film like that in Europe anymore and pretty much in all developed countries too. Maybe if it were in Africa or in some remote village in SEA.

In searching for the primary sources for the quotes in this article I found that "Extreme Metaphors" (ISBN 978-0-00-745485-3) seems to be the best collection of J. G. Ballard interviews.

Quite a few are collected here:

https://www.jgballard.ca/media/interviews.html

One of the interviews referenced in the OP can be found here:

https://www.jgballard.ca/media/1987_november_i-d_magazine.ht...

Here's a totally random piece of trivia: "social media" as a term was coined by the then wife of Seth Goldstein -- who founded a few different companies, Turntable.fm being the most notable -- and was originally the basis of a company he founded that was basically an ad network inside of games and apps built inside of the Facebook platform.

Seth is an interesting dude and I haven't caught up with him in awhile.

It sounds like there is some disagreement about who first used the term. I wouldn't be surprised if they're all telling the truth. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2010/12/09/who-co...

>“I think this reflects a tremendous hunger among people for ‘reality’—for ordinary reality. It’s very difficult to find the ‘real,’ because the environment is totally manufactured.”

I'd say just "reality", not necessarily "ordinary". Other than that, I agree with Ballard's sentiment. We're starved for genuineness, and instead we're compulsively throwing ourselves into hyperstimuli-ridden mockeries of essential needs: sex, friendship, love, food, stories, competition, playtime, spirituality, exploration. It's honestly baffling. And going only for their genuine counterparts is such an incredibly lonely experience, given the state of the world that we live in nowadays, that you'd need incredible willpower to withstand it.

The power of narrative made personal. If we aren't plucked chickens we are storytellers. The venue and media have changed, from oral tradition around a fire to photons sliding down fibers and fingers dancing on keyboards.

Narrative is a powerful and primitive force for humans, how we've always sought to impose structure and sense on events, from history to religion, to the mundane everyday and the trip abroad. Our brains crave narrative and invent it in a vacuum or as the interstitial bond between disconnected random events.

We can now own our public narrative and mythologize a heroic and extraordinary existence divorced from banal reality of paying bills and waiting in queues and going to the washroom and changing lightbulbs. Only the highlight reel makes it to prime time.

Social media are campaigns to seize control of narrative, to bring structure and synthetize relationships, to make sense of the world.

Predates print and electronic media, predates recorded history, a paradigm shift through Mcluhan's lens (always preferred his precursor, Innis).

Fascinating on a meta level, this comment being an example of its own thesis.

I wrote a similar piece on an earlier artist who I thought was similarly prescient, Nam June Paik

https://zwischenzugs.com/2020/01/04/the-astonishing-prescien...

Every day Ballard gets more right. I suggest you seek out interviews with him on Youtube, there are several there.

The text presented only talks about watching oneself, it doesn't mention watching each other's recording. So it does capture some of the self-centeredness, but it's not describing social media.

I _believe_ it was in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash where a pair of 7 year old brother-sister twins used complimentary and contradictory postings -- sometimes assuming eachother's identities or creating new ones -- in newsgroups to influence public opinion. When disinfo on Facebook and Twitter went nuclear in 2015 -2016 those fictional siblings were first to mind

I think you have it backwards. Snow Crash was published in 1992. The article references things Ballard said in the 70's and 80's

I don't think GP is making a point about which came first or whatnot. Just sharing a connection they made.

My apologies then

thanks, no problem

I think you are thinking of "Locke" and "Demosthenes" in Ender’s Game.

The reality of which was best summarised by https://xkcd.com/635/

It's ironic how that comic aged far more poorly than the original premise it made fun of.

By 2016, anonymous online political commentary was directly influencing major world events.

I mean only in the aggregate, only if you got a big community to do it or got picked up and amplified by a political leader. I can't think of any anonymous blog posts which changed the world. Movements like Anonymous have had an impact, but there's a more to that than online screeds. The closest analog might be Q, aka an anon like Ron Watkins, but that itself was swept up in a larger movement that pushed and pulled in all sorts of different directions.

To me the idea of kids posting on Internet forums and becoming major political leaders through their pseudonyms, through logical language like a modern-day version of the Federalist Papers, does seem pretty silly in 2024.

Heck, book-length political treatises by anonymous insiders barely got any traction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Hubris

Fair point about it being in aggregate would what an aggregation it was back in 2014, 2015 and 2016. And it was a mix of groups and goals -- some were partisans who intentionally disinformed while others were apolitical and driven by opportunism and greed. maybe there was some overlap, maybe some codependence. But they certainly changed the world imho by preventing what would've been a more responsible Clinton Administration from managing the pandemic in the US for example.

You should check out the Bitcoin whitepaper.

By 2016, we'd realised that the way to influence people with anonymous political commentary was to do the exact opposite of producing detailed, well-reasoned arguments...

Were there "detailed, well-reasoned arguments" before?

Just looking at political commentary from the 80s and 90s, it's mostly nonsense.

I'm a huge xkcd hater, but I would give that strip credit for unintentionally capturing a snapshot of the internet. Most anonymous WordPress blogs languished in obscurity, truly people's live journals that no one cared to comment on, let alone add you to their blogroll. That era of discourse has been superseded by far louder (and dumb and obnoxious) Mediums.

true

In Orson Scott Card's "Enders Game" as well. Children had been bred and trained to be tactical so Ender's siblings applied their talents locally to manipulate geopolitics as a side story.

I think that's actually what I'm thinking of. I think they were Ender's siblings, actually Thanks, you saved me from re-reading Count Zero too

And, of course, yesterday's Met Gala had as its theme Ballard's story "The Garden of Time". Timely.

French director Tati's film "Mon Oncle" certainly made satire of the obsession with modernity that post WWII France was experiencing.

This author was english and wrote this in 1977, what does what you're saying have to do with it?

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