The Blind Giant (33 page)

We are, both online and off, unnerved in the extreme by entities that don’t respond to normal human patterns in a reliable way. Something that appears human but doesn’t perform like one is alarming to us – like a waxwork. In 1970 robotics researcher
Masahiro Mori suggested that there is an ‘uncanny valley’ – a zone of simulation where something too closely resembles a person but does not perfectly counterfeit one, and is as a consequence more disturbing than it would be if it were clearly non-human. Whether or not the physical version of this idea holds water, the psychological one surely does. That which pretends to human identity but does not respond humanly is deeply unsettling and unwelcome.

Coming back to the discussion of commercial engagement: models that favour the blurring of the line between Us and
Them and encourage community over separation seem to me inevitable. Call it participation, call it hybridization, companies and organizations need to be open to the possibility of connection, to present themselves as what and who they are, without the armour of process and form, to avoid being cast at best as Other and at worst as inimical. The benefit of this flows – perhaps predictably – in all directions: companies get a better relationship with their consumers, which they need because the digital age has transferred power from the holders of rivalrous and excludable goods to the holders of the means of mass duplication; and consumers (which ultimately means everyone) get to move through a world of real relationships and interactions rather than scripted encounters with people functioning as robots (and perhaps, it occurs to me, transforming themselves into inhabitants of the uncanny valley: a human functioning machinically appearing like a robot trying and failing to be a person).

In my experience of the interaction, dealing with companies through social media in situations where the contact is informal, ‘de-professionalized’, is hugely liberating for both sides. Instead of an adversarial discussion of a problem, both sides feel able to concede more and arrive at a solution. Everyone goes that extra mile, and the guarantee of good conduct is not the commercial relationship but the personal one.

There is a story about
Pablo Picasso – I have no notion of whether it’s true – that puts the issue of what is authentic under the microscope.

There had been (the story goes) a series of high-profile forgeries of Picasso’s work, and an auction house asked him to come in and verify that the paintings they were about to put on sale were genuine. The great artist agreed, and on the appointed day arrived with a close friend with whom he was staying while he
was in town. Brought to the room where his paintings were laid out, Picasso ran his hand along the trestle table and sighed.

‘This one is real,’ he said at last. ‘This one also. This, though … this is not. It is a fake. And not a very good one. This is real, and this, this and this. That is not.’ And so on, down the line, and each time he added to the pile of forgeries the auctioneer’s face grew a little sadder and more strained. Finally, he picked up one particular piece, and his friend stopped him.

‘But Pablo,’ the friend said, ‘I saw you paint that one myself!’

Picasso shrugged. ‘I can fake a Picasso as well as anyone,’ he said.

All right: it’s a great story. Let’s assume for a moment that it all took place as I’ve recorded it here. Taking it as given that some of the pictures so identified were actually fakes, their chain of connection is fundamentally broken; the artist did not conceive them in his mind, execute them with the skill of decades with his own hands. There is none of his sweat in the works. Then there are the other ones, which he did paint, but which he regards as dross. The connection is there, but he asserts that it is broken at the final stage: he was not himself engaged with the work as he was doing it, was not in the flow state, and the result is at best second rate, at worst lacking in the markers of Picasso’s particular genius.

But the most interesting thing is the possibility that Picasso identified as real some paintings he had not himself executed but which he felt were good enough to carry his name. He asserted ownership, even authorship, of these. Does that make them Picassos? Or something else? The narrative connection to him is strong, characterful and interesting. Someone with that kind of money might pay a lot – though perhaps not as much as they’d pay for a Picasso by Picasso – for one of those, not because it’s a good imitation, but because the artist felt it shared identity with him to the point where he was prepared to claim it, perhaps even envied it. He saw himself in it. Someone had engaged with his
work so perfectly that they were able, in whatever limited way, to produce a painting that had more of the quality of his good work than paintings he himself painted on bad days. That person was more closely connected to Pablo Picasso than any number of people who touched his life more directly, and he understood that and in a curious way endorsed it. He recognized the connection to himself and felt it possessed authenticity.

The punchline in the joke, though, comes from the fact that without really thinking it through, we’re apt to feel that a forgery cannot, by definition, have any real connection with the painter whose work is being forged.
Walter Benjamin’s point about a physical history comes back again: the forged painting has no narrative of presence, no path of creation by the hand of Picasso. The physical connection is missing, and touch matters. The sense of touch, immanent and profound, is immensely persuasive to us as a guarantee of reality, even where there is no particular information to be had from it. A physical connection is disproportionately impressive to us. We make pilgrimages, religious or not, to bring ourselves into the physical presence of items we admire and wish to associate ourselves with. The physical history of an object is important.

By way of illustration: I bought, a few years ago, a black vinyl laptop bag with a garish orange silk patch on it. I have subsequently mistreated this bag woefully, so that the orange patch is smeared with the grime from various European train stations and one or two more far-flung sorts of dirt. It looks like a prop from a zombie movie. If I asked you whether you want to touch it, you would almost certainly look at me as if I were proposing something slightly disgusting.

Except.

Except that before the orange silk patch was stitched on to a bag, it was the re-entry parachute for a Soyuz Space Capsule. It went into orbit, and fell to earth again, bringing its passengers safely back home. It is the closest I will ever get to space, and it
is not in a museum or a cabinet and I will not object if you lay hands on it, for a moment, and think about what remains one of the most remarkable journeys an object can make.

And suddenly, you would at least consider it.

We remain culturally and perhaps also in terms of our construction predisposed to be influenced by our senses, by physical proximity and by presence. We are hybrids: creatures both cognitive and immanent, thoughtful and sensual. I think that beneath the fear of the inauthentic, and in particular the fear of inauthenticity in the digital world – at least in part – is the simple fact that much of our life as human beings is about physical experiences. We’re not instinctively ready to accept realities that can be understood only through cognition. Things and people that are apprehended in the mind but at the same time are objectively real are relatively recent in the lives of our cultures; until now, that category was reserved for stories, legends, hallucinations and dreams.

In general, we experience the world fairly directly. Information from our senses hits our consciousness without passing through our thoughts. It is mediated by the brain; the unconscious does a lot of filtering and assemblage so that what we experience is more like a movie than a lousy, jagged home video with bad sound and uncertain camera work. More scientifically: your vision is surprisingly limited in scope. You see colour mostly in the middle of your field of vision; your brain helpfully colours in objects outside this area. There’s a blind spot in your eye where the optic nerve touches the retina (draw a cross on the pads of your first two fingers, and close one eye; starting six inches away, keep looking at one cross, and move your fingers away from your face; the other cross will disappear, along with the tip of your finger). Your brain interferes in the direct feed, making the world clearer – but all the same, the basic experiences that we have all the time, and through which we perceive everything we will ever experience (unless technology reaches the point of being able to feed
sense data directly into your head), come to us without conscious thought. A great part of us is not modern, not textual, and mistrusts what is only written rather than seen or experienced.

And our thoughts and experiences are physical. The neuro-modulator oxytocin, released during birth, is connected with bonding; it’s sometimes thought of as the ‘love hormone’. Testosterone affects aggression as well as libido. Problems with dopamine and serotonin are implicated in addiction and depression. There is a quiet controversy cooking at the moment over the effect of
Omega 3 oils on personality; a prison study in 2002 seemed to show that low levels of Omega 3 were linked with poor impulse control and violent behaviour: ‘Prisoners given nutritional supplements committed 35% fewer violent incidences than those given the placebo.’ A larger study at HM Young Offenders’ Institution in Polmont will report soon.
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By way of contrast, Steven Pinker references various studies pointing to ‘genetic and neurological mechanisms’ that underlie violence across human societies; in other words, a violent disposition may be a product of genes or environment, and while neither necessarily absolves an individual of criminal behaviour, both propose a physical root of what might appear to be a psychological phenomenon. Perhaps more unnerving in the field of embodied cognition (exactly what it sounds like: thinking in the body), people asked to generate random numbers produce smaller ones if they’re looking down and to the left, larger ones when looking up and to the right.
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Even cognition is not entirely separate from physical action (although the researchers in this study propose that the effect occurs because the subjects learned numbers from left to right as children, and ‘see’ a range of numbers going from low left to top right; if so, it’s an artefact of the way we live).

All of which is to make two points: first, that it is unsurprising that we are suspicious of the authenticity of situations that don’t directly involve the body. We rely on our physical self for so
much more than we are generally aware of, and it shapes us profoundly, but that is not to say that our resistance to primarily cognitive modes of communication is reasonable or helpful. We do better to differentiate between interactions on their merits than on the basis of a perception of what is and is not real that is rooted in that part of us born before the advent of the written word.

Second, the power of sense experience and the body to move the mind – and the apparent strength of the argument that some aspects of personality are predetermined – seems to me to give us a healthy resistance to being overwhelmed by the digital side. We feel balanced between the cognitive, the sensory and the physical, but actually we exist in the overlap of them all. Cognition and sense are not opposed, but complementary and interwoven. As we move forward into the digital world, and engage with one another in mediated situations, as we use the cognitive more and more, we may need to nourish our irrational, immanent side, to make sure it keeps up with our modern, textual, cognitive selves – but I don’t see that as more difficult than any of the other balances we have to learn to strike in our complex, modern lives.

I
N THE PADDOCK
in the middle of a structure the size of an aircraft hangar, a woman pours out her heart to a guy in a blue aviator jacket. (It looks like a Buzz Rickson’s L2-A, the kind of thing men like Neil Armstrong wore when they were test-flying planes in the 1950s.) Listening to this lady is probably a great deal like being a priest hearing confession; her brief speech is a litany of self-accusation. She has come in desperation. It has taken two days to get here, because she had to ride her horse all the way. She left the children with her husband and came alone because she wanted quality time with the horse, to soothe him and be with him. The reason she had to go through all this, and why she needs to be here in the first place: he will not, under any circumstances, travel in or even enter a horsebox. Attempting to force him into one triggers a spasm of fear and fury that frightens her. He is at other times a sweet-natured horse. She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t live like this. If he won’t load – if he cannot learn to brave the box – he will have to be sold.

‘Sold’ sticks in her mouth. She looks down at the sand. People become very, very attached to their horses; failure of the relationship on this level is genuinely traumatic. And there’s a tacit, grisly question of who would buy a non-loader, and what would happen to him. If things don’t change, the outlook isn’t good.