
Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans - evilsimon
http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/henry-farrell-philip-k-dick-and-fake-humans
======
cosmic_ape
previous discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16243067](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16243067)

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DonHopkins
I just re-watched Total Recall for shits and giggles. It's worth it just for
the "two weeks" scene.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY5KTVA_2ys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY5KTVA_2ys)

I was astounded at the number of product placements in that film!

And that there were obvious placements for competing products, like Coke and
Pepsi.

Some of them were hilariously anachronistic, like advertisements for Fuji
Film.

I can't remember any other movie that was quite so frequent and obvious about
product placement, and I definitely didn't get the impression they were trying
to be ironic and channeling PKD's social commentary on the advertising
industry. It just seemed like good old fashioned shameless marketing.

I googled around and apparently I'm not the only person who noticed it. ;)

TOTAL RECALL and the psychology of product placement:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSt2Xbiypsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSt2Xbiypsk)

He mentions that the book "Product Placement in Hollywood Films" estimates
there are 55 appearances of 28 brands in Total Recall.

Best Western wasn't happy with the how their logo was used in the Martian Red
Light District next to a pink neon ADULT MOVIES store sign, and how they only
got 2.5 seconds instead of their expected 5 seconds of exposure.

[https://imgur.com/a/aSaoN0w](https://imgur.com/a/aSaoN0w)

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
I have some Fuji Film on my desk right now, I'll have you know! But I get what
you are saying. :)

I always thought the Total Recall product placement was intentional and
looking around our present future it was spot on.

~~~
DonHopkins
Well I guess it succeeded artistically in giving me the impression that it was
totally shameless marketing and not just another PKD conspiracy theory.

In this universe, maybe Fuji Film instead of Kodak is in still business and on
your desk today, if only because of that shrewd giant blinking billboard of a
product placement, that made them seem "futuristic" to generations of
Schwarzenegger fans. (Not exactly the butterfly effect, but the stockholders
will take it.)

[https://imgur.com/a/3jHzwl6](https://imgur.com/a/3jHzwl6)

Here are some Blade Runner product placements:

[https://productplacementblog.com/tag/blade-
runner-1982/](https://productplacementblog.com/tag/blade-runner-1982/)

I love the Atari placements:

[https://productplacementblog.com/movies/atari-in-blade-
runne...](https://productplacementblog.com/movies/atari-in-blade-runner-1982/)

Apparently product placement in Blade Runner is a curse:

[http://mentalfloss.com/article/67956/10-fascinating-facts-
ab...](http://mentalfloss.com/article/67956/10-fascinating-facts-about-blade-
runner)

10\. IT’S CURSED.

It might not be quite as hardcore-cursed as Poltergeist or The Omen, but Blade
Runner has a curse of its own … on the businesses whose logos appear in the
film. Atari, Pan Am, RCA, Cuisinart, and Bell Phones all suffered severe
business problems in the years shortly after Blade Runner’s release, as did
Coca-Cola, whose 1985 “New Coke” experiment was less than successful. Members
of the Blade Runner production team refer to this as the “product-placement
Blade Runner curse.”

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madaxe_again
This type of article about PKD comes around more and more often these days.

What Dick really got his fingernails under was the idea that our subjective
reality, our semantic map of the real, has become more real to us than any
objective reality. He probes this at many levels, from that of our individual
perceptron driving our subjective reality (eg. Dr Bloodmoney, A Scanner
Darkly) or even the perceptron of others or another being so overwhelmingly
powerful that it drives our reality (eg. Flow my Tears, Our Friends from
Frolix 8). He also explores more directly manufactured realities, as in Ubik
and The Simulacra, where forces actively set out to deceive, both out of
compassion and cruelty - and sometimes just because.

Jean Baudrillard formulated much of PKD’s weltanschauung in his Simulacra and
Simulation, which is as mind-bending a collection of essays as one is ever
likely to read.

A particular recurrent topic for both is the idea that “The Empire Never
Ended” - that we live in the latter-day Roman Empire, having inherited our
fundamental western Judeo-Christian semantic symbol set from the commingling
of Roman culture (Mithratic cult, god co-option, etc.) with first century
Palestinian culture. Our map of reality is that which was last substantially
updated then, and everything we have done since is on the map, rather than the
underlying reality.

It all gets very gnostic (another favourite theme of PKD’s), but I do think
that there’s a fundamental and valid observation that is made and expounded
upon about the malleable nature of human reality.

In today’s world of ubiquitous hyperreality, sensationalised and manufactured
narratives, instantaneous and often wildly speculative coverage of ambiguous
events so far removed from us yet seemingly right on our doorstep, this
philosophy becomes deeply compelling.

That reminds me - Hypernormalisation, an Adam Curtis documentary, provides a
light introduction to many of these ideas, if a bit of Baudrillard is a steep
start.

~~~
max76
> What Dick really got his fingernails under was the idea that our subjective
> reality, our semantic map of the real, has become more real to us than any
> objective reality.

[Warning, will discuss spoilers about a PKD story]

He does this well in his short story Total Recall. The objective reality is
written over by memory implementations. However, he still feels the desire to
go to Mars because no memory implantation can override his inherit nature. The
Grand Truth is so bizarre that during it's first uncovering everyone believes
it is a fantasy. When objective truth is proven true it terrifies those that
know it.

~~~
empath75
> The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
> mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance
> in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should
> voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto
> harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge
> will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful
> position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee
> from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

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stochastic_monk
The issue is more that corporations rather than governments themselves are the
ones controlling the masses. It’s closest to a fascist dystopia through its
context of regulatory capture.

~~~
diydsp
While corporatocracy is a grave ill, it is not moreso than the bigger picture
present in the article, which is that the nature of reality is bending in a
PKDish fashion. Reality and the unreal are infecting each other. This is a
Baudrillardian simulacrum.

It's not even proper to say it's constrained to fascism as the unreality
springs from non-authoritarian sources like flat-earth memes, wikipedia wars
and distraction leading to an _amnesia of how to actually live properly and we
're doing to ourselves._

FTA: Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are
manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious
groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to
deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.”

FTA: Most notoriously, the current U.S. president recently retweeted a
flattering message that appears to have come from a bot densely connected to a
network of other bots, which some believe to be controlled by the Russian
government and used for propaganda purposes.

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elvinyung
> Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy
> acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

I mean I guess we did, by a different kind of SoMa...

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grillvogel
did PKD predict the rise of the NPC?

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Jtsummers
A common theme in several of his novels and a number of short stories were
simulations (simulacra, automatons) being integrated into our cultural
concepts. Even to the point that people _believe_ that their leaders are real,
while really they're just simulated characters putting on a show.

So, yes?

------
naringas
[deleted due to irrelevance]

~~~
grillvogel
that doesn't really have anything to do with this

