ITSS (It’s the System, Stupid)

Two posts ago, I laid out my problem with popular dystopias. But there’s one that actually does nail it—because it uses an ostensible dystopian future to point out to us the extent to which we’re already living in that dystopia, providing a perspective that encourages us to “un-normalize” it. In other words, it’s just telling the truth, rather than gloomily imagining some dark possibility. That dystopia is the one in the series Upload, on Prime Video, a streaming “service” of Amazon, a corporation whose existence and practices serve well as lampoon fodder for the show’s writers. The fact that they can get away with that is, I should acknowledge, one of the most precious, and probably taken-for-granted, freedoms of not living in a totalitarian state, where no one interested in self-preservation would consider engaging in such satire, knowing they would end up just like those who do it in Putin’s Russia.

At first watch, Upload’s dystopia seems to center around a technological problem—the kind of problem we run into when we come up with a disruptive technology whose ramifications we’ve come nowhere close to figuring out in advance. The “upload” of the title is the human consciousness, which can be transferred into a “virtual reality” world upon death—with certain limitations, and for a fee. And that fee goes up with the quality of the “afterlife” on offer. The writers play this to the hilt, with the poorest uploads (and their surviving families) only able to exist in short spurts, because they can’t afford enough data to have more. The rest of the time, their “virtual” selves just freeze into a stasis until their families put money into their accounts.

The last thing I would ever argue is that technology is separate from culture, politics, economics, and social structure. What I will argue is that, in Upload, technology serves as an entrée into an exploration of those bigger things—and not some made-up maybe-someday bigger things, but our own. That entrée, though, isn’t akin to a doorway, through which we pass into the space we’re supposed to be in to do what we’re going to do. The technology remains central to both plot and theme throughout the series—as it would if this world were real.

And that reminds us to consider our own technology in the same way. What does it suggest to us about values, priorities, tastes, and the distribution of power? How is it connected to all those things?

It’s already obvious to you, even if you’ve never heard of this series, that it’s a satire about runaway corporate capitalism in our own time. The technology is definitely gee-whiz—it alters the parameters of human existence itself—but it is a product of “the system,” and its use is controlled by “the system” in ways that reflect all those things I just listed—its values, priorities, tastes, and the distribution of power. The uploads do not get to enjoy the benefits of this technology on their own terms. They enjoy it on the corporation’s terms, and those terms are, literally, in their faces.

What prompted this piece was seeing that the Rolling Stones are playing the big arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, this weekend. When I was growing up, that arena was called The Meadowlands, and while East Rutherford, New Jersey, doesn’t sound like a very important place, the arena serves the population of greater New York City. The thing is, though, that it isn’t called The Meadowlands now. It’s called the MetLife arena. MetLife stands for Metropolitan Life. It’s one of the biggest insurance companies in the U.S., and as far as I’m concerned, big insurance companies are as clear an example of runaway corporate capitalist now-dystopia as any I can think of. The point, though, is that everything has a “corporate sponsor” these days. Corporations put their names on everything. Not only do they own everything, but they want us all to know it.

Upload takes this to a hilarious, but completely plausible, extreme. Literally everything has corporate sponsorship in this world. The show uses actual corporations, and it “merges” them in comedic pairs that nevertheless remind us that one of the important dysfunctions of “the system” is the degree to which corporations are allowed to merge toward monopoly. There’s comedy in the “Kellogg’s—Pennzoil Racquetball Court,” given that the former is a cereal company and the latter makes motor oil, but why not? (I made this particular example up myself, but you get the idea.)

Here, though, we should apply the brakes, because we’re already in danger of falling unconsciously into the fallacy of linear history. It used to not be like this, now it is, and the prediction for the future is that it will get worse. That’s linear. And there is no reason supported by history to assume that it will happen that way. Actual recent history already pokes holes in that fallacy.

While it hasn’t gotten the attention we could wish, our current President has been pushing back hard on this state of affairs, and one of the reasons why is simply because he’s old. He’s so old that he comes from when the working and middle classes mattered, when labor unions were accepted as a good thing by most people, when corporate capitalism was to be restrained and regulated for the good of society, not the other way around, when The New Deal and The Great Society were new and heavily disruptive—in a sorely-needed way. And that bit is the key to fallacy-avoidance—“heavily disruptive.” The world of President Biden’s youth was not the world of his mother’s or grandfather’s youth. All the things he values that I just listed were themselves reactions to problems—but they were constructive attempts at solutions, not just knee-jerk reflexive reactions—the kind of reactions behind the term “reactionary.”

During the time of the “robber barons,” the so-called “Gilded Age,” it was fine for companies to paint their names all over the sides of what are now national monuments. It was fine for them to cut down great swaths of forest, slaughter all the whales, dump poison in the rivers, etc., etc. (The distinction between “gilded” and “golden” is critical in this expression; “gilded” means painted in a very thin veneer of gold, while “golden” means actually made of the stuff.)

I’m writing this, so I can do what I want with it, so I can bring up the Titanic with no more transition than I just gave you. (Perhaps “bring up” was an infelicitous choice of idiom here…) Touted as a technological marvel, the big ship was a thorough manifestation of its time. Built as quickly and cheaply as possible to compete with its rivals, by a ruthless magnate determined to win at any cost, its purported and trumpeted safety features didn’t run very deep, to use another questionable idiom. Even in popular culture, the Titanic is widely-recognized as a technological symbol of its time. It’s more than a symbol, though, There’s more substance to it than that.

We are living in another Gilded Age, though of course with important differences. History only sort of repeats itself, and swings and cycles are never symmetrical; that’s a basic principle of the universe—the arrow of time, the law of entropy; everything changes, all the time, and if it didn’t, time itself would stop.

The world of President Biden’s youth, then, was between the older one and our own—as was the world of perhaps his most influential political ally, Senator Bernie Sanders, who’s even older than he is.

It’s probably because Upload is so obviously about our own time, rather than an unimaginative projection of a pessimistic future not well-grounded in actual history, that I like it as much as I do. Not only can we change how we’re doing things, we are. Those fights are being fought. To win them will require a continuing awakening of sorts in society at large—and both satire and history can serve us well in waking us up.