All but War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex

Abstract

The box office smash from spring 1999, The Matrix, projects a vision of a world in which “real” world objects are actually simulations emerging from streams of bits. Finding himself pursued on a rooftop with no escape except a helicopter, the movie’s hero asks his guide, “Can you fly that thing?” “Not yet,” she says, as she calls their home base systems administrator for software that uploads just in time. In a similar vein, one of Intel’s 1999 ads for the Pentium II processor articulates the consumer’s desire for ever-faster uploads, and ultimately for fusing the digital and the real. As a skydiver plummets to earth alternating anxious glances between the camera and his chute, which appears on the screen one agonizing row of pixels at a time, the voiceover asks: “Time for a Pentium II Processor?” Such images are amusing fantasies. They are also reminders that we are becoming immersed in a growing repertoire of computerbased media for creating, distributing, and interacting with digitized versions of the world. In numerous areas of our daily activities, we are witnessing a drive toward the fusion of digital and physical reality: not the replacement of the real by a hyperreal—the obliteration of a referent and its replacement by a model without origin or reality—as Baudrillard predicted, but a new country of ubiquitous computing in which wearable computers, independent computational agent-artifacts, and material objects are all part of the landscape. To paraphrase the description of the matrix by William Gibson in Neuromancer, data are being made flesh.1 These new media are re-