Myths of the Near Future
In 1895, an audience packed into a cinema to see the latest in film technology, a short 50-second clip of a train arriving at a French train station. The film is named L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat. The crowd's reaction was to run from their chairs, stampeding out of the audience and into the street.
One write-up on the event is from Der Spiegel:
One short film had a particularly lasting impact; yes, it caused fear, terror, even panic....It was the film L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat (Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station)....Although the cinematographic train was dashing toward the crowded audience in flickering black and white (not in natural colors and natural dimensions), and although the only sound accompanying it was the monotonous clatter of the projector's sprockets engaging with the film's perforation, the spectators felt physically threatened and panicked.
This is the closest to people running out of the theatre reporting gets, so the stampede didn't really happen. People didn't actually run off; the mythology has been repeated so much that this spectacle of people running from their seats away from a train is etched into the film canon. Instead, people knew what to expect, were marvelled, and perhaps a little uncomfortable, as they viewed the oncoming train as the latest Lumière brothers' intrigue. In his essay, Cinema's Founding Myth, Martin Loiperdinger examines the foundations of this story, explaining that it mostly existed as a way to keep people interested in film as a medium, demonstrating its growth, and showing that those who fell for the tricks of this new toy were foolish.
I'd have to properly research this, but I have heard the same about Robinson Crusoe, which is widely viewed as the first novel, was published weekly in newspaper columns and readers believed it to be made up of actual accounts of a person shipwrecked and stranded on a remote island. It's worth noting the mythology that arose from people screaming at Bob Dylan going electric. This one's definitely real, and those militant folk fans did exist, but the mythology that built up around these times said that you were either with us or against us. You either got with the program, or you would be left at the sidelines, afraid of a projected image or screaming obscenities at Bob Dylan on a live LP.
These are experiments, tools to tell us not to be fooled by our reality, they tell us those who are fooled will not be treated lightly. They single out the people who ran up against modernity, those folks that thought electric music was inauthentic, or that believed everything they read in a newspaper to be true, they are wrong and are deserving of mockery.
This weekend, we saw the Pope in a puffer jacket, looking like he was one of those Hackney locals that treat walking their dog as a runway. Now, I'm sure I'm not the only one, but for a couple of minutes, I thought that some Italian atelier was outfitting the Vatican. Of course, they weren't; we weren't getting Prada x Papacy. But this was potentially the best use of midjourney's V5 out there. Many images were released onto the web this weekend now that AI image generators have finally learned how to successfully render hands. Many were easily spotted as fake news (thousands of images of Trump being arrested). But finally, we've seen one that's not instantly verifiable, one that makes you sit and say for a second, "Holy shit, the Pope looks cool," and then check yourself, and look up "Pope puffer jacket," quickly receiving a giggled scolding from Google.
This was the making of a new mythology, the moment when it wasn't just the weird online far-right falling for these images of Trump's detention; it was viewers falling for something believeable and fun. We're not running from the internet; we're not throwing our Alexa-activated toasters out for their association with this falsehood. We're enjoying the spectacle and moving on, and learning something from that experience. Like in the movie theater of 1895, we are having to accept that in the here and now, our eyes may deceive us. Our minds, though, are now able to spot some of these deceptions and learn from them.
We live in deceptive times; the UK's government deceives people into believing everyone but themselves are the cause for their own inability to govern. This month, it's been the titanic evils of the world that have scuppered their chances of utopia, namely, drag queens and refugees. If we can have one thing that makes us just a little better at not believing quite everything we hear, at spotting these lies, then maybe we're not completely doomed.
It's worth noting that this is simultaneous to a stampede out of the cinema and into the streets in the world of AI. There are signatories writing into a pledge to pause the creation of digital minds too quickly. This reads like hype, like a way of showing investors that if they go in now, they will be vastly rewarded in an amount of time we can't even plan for. Elon, tells his investors, "Invest in this and there's going to be too much progress, we can’t even account for it" much in the same way that the Der Spiegel article that published the myth of the train was saying, "It's so good you'll feel like you're about to die!"
Cycles of hype often feel like they aren't something we can reckon with; they made some people believe that crypto was the universal fix for corrupt capitalism. These cycles of hype get people buying and believing in things they'd never heard of before and thinking a new wave of change is absolutely imminent when, in reality, it's just a new fashion that people are following. Usually, rather than being afraid of these new fashions or looking at them with the utmost seriousness, it's better to enjoy the object that is being produced.
Like the fashion of puffer jackets
On the Pope.
What I’m Reading
The following are some readings which have influenced me:
Revolutionary Mathematics by Justin Joque (specifically where write about crypto being anitcapitalist, I was reading about Stacco Trucoso)
on substack, this post in particular https://substack.com/inbox/post/110922910´Cinema’s Founding Myth´is available here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236802861_Lumiere's_Arrival_of_the_Train_Cinema's_Founding_Myth#:~:text=The%20myth%20says%20that%20people,Loiperdinger%202004)%20.%20...
I also used a different pope to the meme one, from user @ElMalaguero on twitter, made on midjourney.
the title is a klaxons reference. It’s 2023 and that album still slaps.