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A MIND CUBED
Philip K. Dick is arguably the most influential writer of science fiction in the past half century. Even though the sum total of his career was relatively short, he wrote 121 short stories and 45 novels.
While he was a popular author and philosopher while he was alive most people know about his work today many years after he died in 1982. Most people know about many of the movies that have been based on Phillip’s short stories for example The movie “Blade Runner” is based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, The movie “Total Recall, that starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and was rebooted in the year 2012 was based on Dick’s short story written in 1966 called “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” Tom Cruise starred in the film “Minority Report,” Richard Linklater directed “A Scanner Darkly” and, Matt Damon starred in “The Adjustment Bureau” a film I feel depicts the way the legendary Men in Black do their handy work.
One of my favorite Phillip K. Dick Stories is from the book “Minority Report” called “the Mold of Yancy, which sums up my political views and depicts the President on an unknown planet as an artificial intelligence that can be made to say whatever makes the public feel good about themselves.
During a Science Fiction Convention I was one a panel member in where the topic discussed was about whether or not Science fiction writers are actually prophets. While most of the panel members were actually negative towards the idea that Science fiction writers are prophetic I cited the works of Ray Bradbury, the politically active Michael Crichton and focused my affirmative views on the subject matter by using Philip K, Dick as a legendary mind that has written some insightful commentary in the past that we now are seeing transpire in our present world.
I focused my argument on the advent of predictive policing which of course was the main theme of Dick’s “Minority Report.” Recently adopted predictive policing methods, in varying stages of development across the US and around the world, have the same goal: authorities hope to anticipate crimes and act before they occur. Initial efforts work largely through computer algorithms, or formulas that analyze years of criminal reports to predict where the next crime will likely transpire.
In the 1956 story, there are three mutants called “pre-cogs” who can see the future. Paradoxes and alternate realities are created by the precognition of crimes when the chief of police intercepts a precognition that he is about to murder a man he has never met. Like many stories dealing with knowledge of future events, “The Minority Report” questions the existence of free will.
Today we do not have mutants with precognition predicting crimes, but the United States Government has software that can mine social media to predict everything from future terrorist attacks to foreign uprisings. President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law allowing indefinite detention to be codified into law.
The NDAA has badly bludgeoned the constitutional right of due process. The US has pursued “domestic terrorism” by practicing pre-emptive prosecution that is, going after individuals who have committed no crime but are alleged to possess an ideology that might dispose them to commit acts of “terrorism”. Maintaining that it can -and should – be in the business of divining intent or literally using whatever they can to pre-cog crime.
Precognition is a common ability in Dick’s Science Fiction world, where chronological time seems more a necessary structure to keep his middle- and working-class heroes semi-sane than a hard reality. Information flows in unpredictable directions, and all parties and interests seek control of it. Business executives, real estate speculators, police, journalists, spies, god-children, clergymen, con artists, drug dealers, advertising agencies, androids, generals, and presidents struggle to understand and predict the consequences of the data they collect.
Philip K. Dick really was a prophet, and like all true prophets he often couldn’t figure out what the visions meant.
What was the most fascinating thing about Dick’s works is that they can easily be the foundation for the idea of the open conspiracy and how it operates in front of people who are not yet aware of how things are set up. Phillip K. Dick would include in his stories characters that were always subjected to mind-manipulating media predictive programming and simulacra. It shows that the way society appears to be structured is a complete fabrication, and that media manipulation conceals the real centers of power or hides what I like to call the cryptocracy.
In February of 1974. Dick claimed that he was being contacted from a computer probe that he claimed it was from the future. Once again he heard an electronic voice that called itself Valis. Dick claimed that he was hit by a pink beam of light. It happened while opening the door to the delivery girl from the pharmacy. Dick was recovering from wisdom teeth extraction and needed medication. The young hippie gorl came to his door her fish pendant representing Christianity catches his eye, and a stream of pink light enters his mind.
When asked what Valis meant Dick had mentioned that a metallic voice claiming to be a probe from the future called itself a Vast Artificial Living Intelligence System.
VALIS helped the author turn his life around with highly accurate advice, provided a range of deep mystical insights and even found him a new literary agent to help give his career a boost. However, in the wake of his contact with VALIS, Dick found his mail opened, his phone tapped, his house broken into and himself under surveillance from shadowy government agents and individuals connected to companies conducting scientific research for the US Department of Defense.
Until his death in 1982, Dick struggled to understand what had happened to him, writing more than two million words of a document called Exegesis that tried to analyze much of what VALIS had revealed. While he had many theories about the nature of his experience, one of the strongest was the one portrayed in his 1980 novel, VALIS. In the book, VALIS is suggested to be a sentient computer from the future in orbit around Earth, beaming messages to selected individuals.
He theorized that there have been throughout history probes, and spaceships that would beam down intelligence to certain people. That many of the most learned minds of the world would hear that small metallic voice from a celestial body that come close to earth.
One of the most profound things that Philip K. Dick had expressed in his writings is that you can’t always count on your interpretation of reality. I actually in madcap way understand that more so than most.
“Reality” for me has always been a word that I believe should be used in quotes. We really cannot count on a shared reality with others when there are so many people who are now resonating with various forms of what is truly reality and what is fantasy. The line between the two has become fuzzy and not so stable.
The consensus among many Science Fiction writers is that there are no prophets in science fiction, for everything I felt Philip K. Dick Got right there was always someone reminding me of what he got wrong.
Many other writers have got it wrong, especially when it comes to cool space spaceships, extra terrestrial colonies and world transforming breakthroughs. Philip K. Dick used those things a lot in his stories and it just didn’t turn out that way.
What is happening, and what Dick did get right was the idea of schoolchildren that are well behaved because they are doped up by drugs like Ritalin and Adderall. Technology that doesn’t really improve our lives. Just complicates them but of course it is a necessary evil. Pop up ads that continually show up that you can’t get rid of.
A president with a record so convoluted and opaque that it’s impossible to tell what is false and what isn’t. This brings me back to my favorite Philip K. Dick Story “The Mold of Yancy.”
I mean, think of how we pick Presidential candidates. We pick them by how they look and how well we like their Campaign ads. In the “The Mold of Yancy” a presidential candidate is totally unavailable and never seen outside of his video ads, because, it turns out, he doesn’t actually exist. At the time I think Phillip was speaking or at least thinking of Eisenhower, I wonder what he would have thought of Barack Obama?
The Reason why Dick got so much right was because he knew a lot about human nature. He stood for the value of humanity. If it was a pink laser beam from a Vast Artificial Living Intelligence System that gave him his visions, then perhaps whatever it was wanted to warn us of what we would become.
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