“Alike to the arrival of that alien spacecraft, the global spread of Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has brought the collapse of one of the thinnest layer of the neoliberal global project”
In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan refers to an “instant interplay of cause and effect” (25) in the total structure of society as a characteristic of the interdependence of any oral society. This instant interplay of cause and effect, according to McLuhan, is an inherent feature of a village, and as an extension of what he labels as the “global village”. McLuhan, in the early 1960s, anticipated that technological innovation was going to transform the whole model of human communication to the point of shifting the entire world system from a geopolitics anchored in national divisions to a global order of constant communicative interdependence. Fifteen years before McLuhan’s theoretical approach to understanding future human communication, George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) drew a dystopian portrayal of a society controlled and shaped through the mediation of television screens. 1984 represents society as a totalitarian and communist corporation (Big Brother) that is permanently at war with external forces, and even despite that the members of this corporation only experience this “international” war through the mediation of the messages shared by the leaders on television, fear is the emotional force that weaves the actions of everyone. As it is expected from a totalitarian communist regime, there is a constant interplay of cause and effect in relation to the experience of individual fear, for an action that subverts the regime’s rigorous biopolitical guidelines brings irreversible consequences. We witness such consequences through Winston Smith’s torturing process, who ultimately has to give up his individual mental freedom in order to remain alive.
Not only relationships have to be approved beforehand by the Big Brother, but also individual transit from one place to another within the confines of the regime’s territory. Furthermore, oral expression is constantly monitored and designed to served the Big Brother’s goals. The novel ends showcasing the radical mindset and vital repression of Winston, who after experiencing various forms of torture feels obliged to accept that 2+2=5, thus defying both reason and common sense. Even though 1984’s society is not a global village in a strict sense, we already find in Orwell’s novel the elements – as if it was a piecemeal déjà vu that will add and transform elements over the coming decades – of McLuhan’s global village, highlighting the transformative role that new technologies will enact in future societies.
Radiohead’s tribute to Orwell’s 1984, a song titled “2+2=5”, while it lyrically makes allusion to the sensorial consequences of questioning the government’s authority, it also resonates as a prophecy of what humans worldwide have been instructed, if not imposed, in 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic: “I’ll stay home forever/where two and two always makes a five”. Colony, a television series aired between 2016-2018, takes 1984’s communist dystopian elements and translates them to the neoliberal language where – paraphrasing Radiohead – “ego (I) and consumption always makes happiness/survival”. However, as a dystopian series, Colony features a “global village” where constant technological innovations, besides serving superfluous individual needs such as shopping, are the means to monitor and coerce the biopolitical trajectories of a global oral society whose main headquarters are located in Davos, Switzerland (the place where each year a group of various political agents meet to strengthen the interests of the wealthiest of the world).
Colony narrates the end of the human world – who is constantly under the attack of alien forms of intelligence – through a middle-class American family, who are forced to militarize even their youngest daughter in order to remain alive in a global village/community/society that is constantly changing the governing rules to both adapt to alien threats and guarantee the comfort of those in power. At first, the only alien forces that we see in Colony are embodied in the police force, but as the show unravels we also see robots and ultimately an alien form of intelligent military life able to defeat the most powerful human weapons. The show final scenes portray the arrival of an alien spacecraft that only by being present unleashes a sort of global nuclear attack. That is, so to speak, the end of humanity.
Alike to the arrival of that alien spacecraft, the global spread of Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has brought the collapse of one of the thinnest layer of the neoliberal global project, that which anchors our biological nature to our planetary mission as the species that historically has claimed to be the most advanced form of life in the planet Earth. Suddenly, Chinese news from December 2019 became not only viral in media but also a biopolitical message that is reshaping global ecosystems and our understanding of our precarious human condition. Widespread social turmoil, national lockdowns and quarantines, global “stay at home” orders have taken over human lives across the globe as mandates that, according to those in power, are the direct consequence of the Coronavirus emergency. However, even a panoramic look at the configuration that human life was acquiring after the end of the Vietnam War would challenge the notion that our most crucial current global issues are due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Economic inequality, the fragility of national health systems, racial discrimination, and widespread social dissatisfaction have been present, at least, since the inception of Modernity at the global scale in the 15th century.
Both Orwell’s 1984 and Colony portray dystopian social realities in which human beings, even the best equipped to survive, surrender to unknown forces. In the case of 1984, the unknown is only visible through television screens; in Colony, the unknown materializes into non-human entities that, like Artificial Intelligence, at first seem under human control, but as these forces grasp the vulnerabilities of humans – both as individuals and members of a community – they take over the planetary reality. Moreover, in 1984, there is only one path towards survival, which is total submission to the regime’s warfare goals; in Colony, the level of individual survival is based on the social stratum of individuals as the ruling elite has launched a global neoliberal project that aims at colonizing other planets as well. Therefore, both the preservation of the neoliberal status quo and defense are the top priorities of the ruling elite, who through the use of intelligent borders administer the flow of people across the global landscape. In many ways, the current global social environment resembles Colony, with the only difference that humanity is under the attack of a biological weapon, globally called Coronavirus, which has brought health-related consequences unseen during previous pandemics.
While the global population awaits the arrival of a vaccine, we are constantly fed by scientific information and various forms of artistic contents that underline that human reality won’t be as we formerly experienced it. In addition, governments worldwide through media maneuvers have launched a propagandistic campaign pushing forward what is called “the new normalcy/normality”. Nevertheless, this “new normality” has been defined by the deepening of violence among those communities that historically have been relegated to either a submissive status – thinking in terms of Orwell’s 1984 – or a militarized yet subordinated status as it is the case of those who resist the status quo – as it happens in Colony. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 brought to the global surface the fact that, despite Coronavirus and the radical changes that it has forced into our human reality, humans are indeed the worst enemy against humanity. Android gadgets and the use of media have allowed for the creation of the “instant interplay of cause and effect” that McLuhan attributed to the global village, which is to say a technological ecosystem where individuality runs the risk of vanishing among the waves of virtual reality. Meanwhile, I hope that this new age of protest, which is mobilizing youth worldwide, finds a set of maneuvers that bring an outcome that does not resemble neither 1984 or Colony, all while alien forces have already landed on the Earth under the name of Coronavirus.
WORKS CITED
Colony. USA Network: 2016-2018. 36 episodes.
Orwell, George. 1984. Harcourt: 1949.
Radiohead. “2+2=5”, Hail to the Thief. Parlophone/Capitol: 2003.
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