Gradually Enter Determinant
渐进·行列式
Yuhang Yang
You never imagine how bad your future life will be.
I want to ask a question first: How do you think about your consciousness? How do you think about ‘true’?
Of course, you can continue through the project without answer.
Karl Mannheim said: “Today’s Utopia is likely to become the reality of tomorrow, and all kinds of utopias are often just the truth of premature birth.” If imagination is the future, Utopia is the future world.”
CHAPTER I
From the Garden of Eden in the Bible to the hell of Dante’s Divine Comedy, from Plato’s Republic to Thomas Moore’s Utopia, human beings have been fabricating another imaginary world in parallel while building the real world. For the ideal world, or out of the pursuit of perfect space-time, or from the vision of the blueprint, or expression of satire and criticism of reality, or indulge in the depth of nothingness, and eventually fall into the situation of anti-utopia.
What dystopia shows is an ideal society that looks fair and orderly, without poverty and strife. It is actually controlled by all-round, only free appearance, and human dignity and humanity are denied. The dystopian worldview focuses on portraying a bad society and aims to criticize the shortcomings of the existing system. In Karl Popper’s anti-communist declaration, Open Society and its Enemies, Karl Popper said: “The Utopia method relies only on Plato’s philosophy of belief in an absolute and unchanging ideal, plus two further assumptions. To be saved, these two assumptions are: (a) there is a rational way of determining what this ideal is once and for all, and (b) what is the best way to decide to achieve it.”
The dystopian trilogy is precisely the literary reflection of such anti-utopia ideas, which led to the first theme of dystopia – anti-totalitarianism. A highly unified utopia based on a unified public value causes this anxiety of individual lack.
The fear of the disappearance of individuality is also reflected in the alienation of science and technology to human beings, which shows the question of the modernization process of the 20th century. The rationalism and science and technology that people have advertised have not brought humanity to a beautiful and happy world. On the contrary, the highly mechanized life has become despicable and cruel. This is the second theme of dystopia-anti scientism/rationalism/modernity. At this level, it is more like “human-like organisms or machines.
This background of social contradictions brought about by the development of science and technology has created the birth of cyberpunk. Cyberpunk’s worldview often exhibits the characteristics of “high-tech level” and “low living standard”, and thus has a utopia-like character. The cyberpunk authors often put a deep understanding of the current social reality, the reflection of history, and the reflection of philosophy.
In this part, I mainly investigate the era background of megastructure and the extension and understanding of different organizations. Through their projects, we can see that they express a kind of yearning or worrying about the future through their mega-architectures. But there is one factor that cannot be avoided: technology. The worship of science and technology has materialized everything and commodity fetishism has risen quietly. While satisfying the material foundation, we are gradually losing our loyalty to the spiritual paradise. All things can be replaced by materialization. What we get is technology, what we lose is imagination. There is only one mirror between Utopia and Anti-Utopia. Outside the mirror is a high-rise building. Inside the mirror is a maggot with decaying capital.
CHAPTER II
In the dystopian world, architecture has become a direct symbol of power while satisfying people’s daily lives. The large and thick structure of the Fauvism, the thick volume reveals a sense of oppression. In this part, I put the giant architecture under the background of dystopia and combine the two. Any megastructure is created by the combination of all the material technologies of wisdom, technology, aesthetics, etc. of the Creator (Human). It is the crystallization of our wisdom, reflecting not only the human level of technology, but also the social structure and social form of the time. In order to lead to the cyberpunk worldview.
Anti-Utopia has created the birth of Cyberpunk. In the cyberpunk framework system, the fusion of mechanical objects and organisms seems to symbolize the gradual spillage of physical entities from certain boundaries. The society of cyberpunk is extremely sensitive to matter, and the unsatisfied desires and desires form a mutual drive. And the sharp opposites of the binary. Capitalism continually dissolves everything, and the realization of the spectre of Marx’s phantoms: the bourgeoisie is extremely divided, and the few who have added wealth and possession have too much space, while most people live a hidden and humble scene in crowded scenes. life.
In short, the word “Cyberpunk” emphasizes t w o b a s i c a s p e c t s : t e c h n o l o g y a n d i n d i v i d u a l i s m , w h i c h c a n b e b r o a d l y understood as “anarchism using machines” o r ” m a c h i n e / c o m p u t e r r e b e l l i o u s movements. In Cyberpunk’s story setting, there is always a “system” that controls most “ordinary” people. The system can be an authoritarian government, a patriarchal large conglomerate or a feudal religion. These systems, through some kind of technology, especially information technology, strengthen people in the ruling system, creating machines that can think like humans and people who think like machines. Usually these technical systems extend into the “components” of the human body through brain implants, artificial limbs, clones or genetically engineered organs, while humans become part of the “machine.”
People began to imagine and reflect on the power of technology. The advancement of technology does not seem to bring good utopian happiness to people as expected. On the contrary, the negative impact of technology has become more and more obvious. People have been thinking about it. The technical utopian social image began to collapse, and the negative Utopia society, full of technological rationality, totalitarianism, industrial machinery and national ideology, began to take shape.
CHAPTER III
If consciousness really exists, can only human beings have consciousness?
If consciousness is carried by digital artificial intelligence, can artificial intelligence also breed its own consciousness?
If artificial intelligence has its own consciousness, can humans treat “them” equally?
The difference between religion and myth
The essence of religion is faith, and the essence of myth is to create faith.
The religious culture in the cyberpunk culture has evolved into one of its core concepts, part of cybernetics.
If the world really has God, human beings are ignorant and small creatures in the eyes of God, and the trick is that God needs to rely on human beliefs to exist. So how does God treat these faith-providing creatures?
Guide and control them, and establish your own authority, and when necessary, make some powerful punishments that will not destroy the land. However, in the world of cyberpunk, the god with the most believers in the world is – technology.
In the cyberpunk culture system, technology plays almost the same role as the gods. Even in some film and television literature, there are groups that describe the madness of technology and the development of religion. It’s just that the obvious and very ridiculous thing is that technology is almost always in the hands of human beings. Only in the world of cyberpunk, only the rights groups and consortia have mastered the lifeblood of this belief and mastered the lifeblood of the group they want to control.
As an ordinary individual, we naturally want to have absolute control over the electronic products or consumer goods that belong to us, whether robots or bionics. As a rights group, they want to control everyone through the products they provide.
When God created some living things because of certain needs, one day, God discovered that the creatures that he created were growing up, learning, and becoming more and more like themselves, even to the point of challenging their authority. The deterrent and even direct damage of force can no longer prevent these creatures created by themselves from continuing to evolve themselves, and there will be a fear of fear.
The megastrstructure of the future is built on the ruin of the original building, which has a strong sense of form and logic. Underground is once buried buildings, broken cables, reinforced concrete, and above ground is a huge integration of the functions and facilities of the above-mentioned system.
In the post-human era, superhumanists hope to bridge the gap between human beings and other species through the combination of technology and human beings. Robot expert Moravik even put forward the idea of “duplicating ideas, abandoning bodies, living in specialized body simulators, even as a mere existence of ideas…”. For the whole society, the control of information is an important factor to maintain internal stability. When the social structure (system structure) tends to be more complex, the cost of maintaining the control of information will be higher. Because of the complexity, the uncontrollable factors that lead to the collapse of internal stability will be greater.
So I recombined the above devices to create a new computing logic, trying to replace the existing way of life of human beings through machines. But this does not mean that social contradictions no longer exist. On the contrary, rights will be more evident through network permissions.
In the virtual world, everyone will be assigned an account, each account is equivalent to a user. When a user initiates a login request, the gateway verifies the user’s identity, returns the legal token to the client, and rejects it directly if the authentication fails. Everyone has an interface and needs legal identity to access each other’s interface. However, there are some “exposed interfaces” in these interfaces, which can be accessed directly without authentication. Often, there are some risks in these interfaces. The risks in cyber world may erase or cancel user information directly. This behavior may directly violate the digital human rights of digital individuals and violate ethics and law. After all, this is a person’s consciousness, erasing their consciousness in the real world is equivalent to murder.
My concept has been formed: in the context of the future cyber world, today’s architectural interior space has been occupied by a variety of electronic devices, which constitute space and occupy space according to the logic of network operation, just like a computer room. , facilities in the machine room.We don’t have to think about the physical comfort and rationality of the space, just consider how to place these devices in this space. Not only that, the space and construction of these devices have become the embodiment of a religious belief, intensively arranged lines, CPUs, large storage devices, energy supply equipment, and security facilities for layer-by-layer inspection.We will regard them as gods of the new world.
Therefore, I intend to construct a huge building full of religious implications. This building needs to satisfy the future needs of people’s digital space life. The various facilities and equipment to create this virtual space will become part of the physical space. How to assign tasks and functions to each part in order to guarantee the virtual world? Normal human life has become the theme of my space design.
Perhaps, in the future virtual world, the element of “true” will become a new belief, which can be real material, such as building various circuits, mechanized parts of the digital world, or true emotional empathy. . The gradual disappearance of human nature makes it increasingly difficult for people to touch the “truth”.
