2008. Zero Conditions

ground zero carbon zero coke zero the fate of the future zer conditions barry vacker THE RY ZERO series zero conditions THE RY ZERO series Jean Baudrillard said that theory — if it is to be salvaged after 9/11 and in the new millennium — could be reconstructed on the “theme of zero.” Drawing from art, media, science, and philosophy, this book series by Barry Vacker uses zero as countdown and blastoff for theorizing the existential conditions of postmillennial culture. And here is the key question: are any models for a future utopia possible after the three zeros of 2000? zero conditions crashing into the vanishing points starry skies moving away skyscraper vertigo nevada test sites this series is a THEORY VORTEX experiment THEORIZING postmillennial culture via art, media, science, and philosophy. EXPERIMENTING with digital media to produce creative projects that bypass the constraints and controls of the dominant ideological worldviews. theoryvortex.net theoryzero.net zer conditions barry vacker THEORY VORTEX experiments © Theory Vortex Experiments 2008 ISBN-13: 978-0-9798404-0-1 ISBN-10: 0-9798404-0-6 Theory Zero Series is published by Theory Vortex Experiments. theoryvortex.net The intellectual rights of the author have been asserted. Printed in the U.S.A. table of contents theory zero digital zeros — y2k zero future — the millennium dome zero time — the millennium clocks ground zeros — fight club, new york, new orleans zeropolis — las vegas zero universe — naqoyqatsi and the matrix zero curvature — the flat screen cosmos coke zero — soft drink simulacrum count zero interrupt carbon zero tomorrow — global warming utopia 2000 in paris and new york circles and zeros ends and beginnings nothingness and existence nothingness and tomorrow trajectories toward past and future chaos theory and zero conditions ground zero for theory 9 12 14 17 21 26 28 31 34 38 43 48 51 54 58 63 67 70 92 theory zero Zero is the pivot point between positive and negative, yesterday and tomorrow, countdown and blastoff. — K.C. Cole On the five-year anniversary of September 11, the New York Times created a special section called “Broken Ground: The Hole in the City’s Heart.” Printed on the front page of the special section was a circular photograph of New York City, taken through a powerful fisheye lens from above the tip of southern Manhattan. The aerial photograph covered almost two-thirds of the first page. The city of New York was shown as a giant circle, with Ground Zero at the center, a sixteen-acre hole in the ground, an infinite hole in the heart of the city. With Ground Zero at the center of the image, the remainder of the metropolis warped toward the surrounding vanishing points. In fact, the rest of the universe disappeared beyond the edge of the curving, global vanishing points, leaving the visual impression that New York City is the circle that dominates its planet, the skyscraper metropolis that is the world. In another sense, the New York Times depicted New York City as a giant zero — for what else is a circle with a hole in the center, a hole named Ground Zero? On July 7, 2007, the zero appeared again, only much larger, on a global and cosmic scale. This zero was hovering above the clouds against a blue sky. On both sides of the zero was a capitol S, spelling out SOS, the famed letters signaling distress or emergency. The zero was the centerpiece of the logo for Live Earth, the global “concerts for a climate in crisis.” Upon arriving at the Live Earth Web site, visitors viewed each S disappearing behind the O, the center of which was black. Beside the O were the words “Live Earth” and if one scrolled over the two words, “Live Earth” disappeared against the black background, leaving only the O, the circle that became a zero. Beside the zero, the continents of the Earth were tinted a dark grey, perhaps symbolizing the effects of carbon fuel consumption. The area that would have been 9 oceans was black. In the Live Earth logo, we can see a zero in the blue skies with a black center, a new ground zero, an SOS signaling countdown to the ecological apocalypse or blastoff for a carbon zero tomorrow. In each of these images we see a circle confronting a zero, symbolizing a world with a hole in it, a world of being confronting a nothingness at its heart, a cultural world crashing into its vanishing points. This is why the first two books of the Theory Zero series are called Zero Conditions and Crashing Into The Vanishing Points. Though initially it may seem bizarre or baffling, zeros and vanishing points together function as illuminating optics for plotting the trajectories of modernity, for theorizing the existential conditions of postmillennial culture. In a 2003 interview, Jean Baudrillard stated that “the theme of zero” could be deployed in theorizing the cultural conditions of the new millennium, especially in wake of the events of September 11, 2001. When asked by Paul Hagerty if it was possible to “imagine something on the void, ground zero, what it means to reconstruct,” Baudrillard replied: It could be done — for example, on the theme of zero — ‘zero death’, ground zero — that whole global doctrine.1 How could “the theme of zero” be a ground for the reconstruction of theory, after the Ground Zero of September 11? The seemingly strange nature of this suggestion should not be surprising, for Baudrillard has long argued that conventional cultural theory is no longer adequate for explaining the emerging postmillennial global cultures. In the 2006 book and film, An Inconvenient Truth, former United States Vice President Al Gore explained the science of global warming and illustrated the potential apocalyptic effects on nature and civilization. Gore wrote: We are witnessing an unprecedented and massive collision between our civilization and the Earth.2 Unless the factors that are causing global warming — increasing greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by human technology — are reversed, Gore believes that modern civilization faces a threat to its existence. To avert 10 disaster requires a reversal of the warming trends, which can be effected by deploying alternative energy technologies and reducing “our individual carbon emissions down to zero.” For Gore, modernity is crashing into its vanishing point, and the only way to avert the collision and save the future is to build a zero-carbon tomorrow. The year 2000 was long symbolic of the technological future, the new “world of tomorrow” filled with utopian possibilities for art and culture, science and technology, humanity and secular society. Yet something seems awry in the theory of the future, for there has been a strangely recurring theme of zero involving art, science, and technology, in many forms, from film to physics to architecture, all seeming to say something about the fate of the world in the third millennium — double 00s of Y2K — space-time zeros of the Millennium Dome — zeros of the Millennium Clocks — Ground Zero in New York City, New Orleans, and Fight Club — Zeropolis of Las Vegas — zero universes in Naqoyqatsi and The Matrix — zero-branes of string theory — voids of the big bang — Coke Zero — William Gibson’s Count Zero Interrupt — countdown to zero in Lost — Al Gore’s zerocarbon tomorrow. In addition, three books were published about the history and science of zero — Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and Chet Raymo’s Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the PRIME MERIDIAN.3 Finally, the post-9/11 cultural critique of Paul Virilio was entitled Ground Zero.4 The patterns of zeros are more than a clever conceit or millennial numerology, for the zeros not only suggest dangerous cultural and intellectual trajectories, but also signal the moments of singularity for a massive cultural transformation. Baudrillard’s “theme of zero” and Gore’s “collision” of civilization together express the essential themes and philosophical groundings of this wide-ranging cultural critique. Literally and metaphorically, the zeros illustrate the entropy and exhaustion of modernity, that global culture shaped by the once-utopian trajectories of science and technology. Theory is confronting the zero conditions — ends, exhaustions, reversals, nothingnesses, voids, vanishing points, singularities. The year 2000 arrived, but the future seems to be crashing into the world of tomorrow. It is ground zero for theory. 11 digital zeros — y2k The year 2000 will not perhaps take place. But they do not know it. — Jean Baudrillard The Y2K computer problem was the nonevent that mapped and masked real events entering the millennium. Also known as the Millennium Bug, the Y2K problem triggered fears that the zeros in the year 2000 would crash the global information networks, and thus cripple the computers and machines that power the modern world. It was as if the approaching zeros of the year 2000 demarcated the horizon of the new millennium, the year of “the future,” yet these same zeros were perhaps lying in wait, ready to effect the technological apocalypse around the world. Technically speaking, of course, the new millennium would not arrive until 2001, yet the number two followed by three zeros offered a powerful symbolic confirmation of the new millennium prior to its actual arrival. Yet, many feared the new millennium might be born with a digital infection, the global plague of the Millennium Bug. As John Barrow wrote: “The reason for this collective loss of sleep, money, and confidence was the symbol of ‘zero’, or two of them to be more precise.”5 With Y2K, the belief was that computers would be unable to recognize the arrival of 2000, which apparently would be coded in the computers as “00” when the clocks struck 12:00:00 on the very moment between December 31, 1999, and January 1, 2000. Concern over the Y2K problem centered on outdated computer code, which made computers unable to account for the first two digits of the calendar year, coded as “99” and not “1999.” Using two-digit code to represent four-digit calendar years was a relic from early computer programs of the 1950s and 1960s, when computer space was scarce and expensive. The first two digits were sacrificed to save computer space, which seems ridiculous now, with cyberspace expanding exponentially in ever more powerful computers. 12 Precisely as we entered the year 2000, the fear was that computers would record the new year as “00” and might conclude that the year was 1900, thus triggering all kinds of financial and monetary miscalculations. The other fear was that computers might malfunction and then crash, effecting a networked cascade that would spread through all the media and energy systems around the world, thus triggering a global technological and cultural crisis — the “knowledge accident” theorized by Paul Virilio as a necessary consequence of the technological complexity of the global information networks.6 Seeking to avoid possible Y2K calamities, governments and businesses engaged in large-scale efforts to “correct” the computer code, spending an estimated $100 billion in America and another $300-500 billion around the world. Apparently the corrections were successful, for even though there were a few glitches around the world, there was no global computer crash at 12:00:00 on January 1, 2000. With Y2K, the technological apocalypse had been avoided yet again, while masking the virtual apocalypse of mediation and simulation, the proliferating postmodern condition theorized by Jean Baudrillard.7 The new millennium eventually arrived in 2001, though perhaps without “the future” or the “world of tomorrow” that was once imagined to arrive. Computers were reprogrammed to enter the millennium, precisely as culture was being deprogrammed to enter “the millennium,” the future that disappears beyond the mediated horizons of image and information, clones and copies, replicas and reproductions. Computers did not crash into the zeros of 2000, yet the modern future crashed into its own vanishing point, a condition made apparent at the Millennium Dome, built at 0 degrees longitude to celebrate the arrival of the year 2000. 13 zero future — the millennium dome You can’t think about the future if you take human nature into account, because human nature doesn’t change. Human nature has no future. The future of human nature is the past. — Fran Leibowitz The year 2000 and “the future” were the subjects of a year-long celebration — the utopian project at the Millennium Dome in London. While the Millennium Dome generated a financial controversy in Britain, overlooked were the deeper meanings in the Millennium Dome and the “Millennium Experience” held inside the dome. The events at the Millennium Dome reflected the longstanding international tradition of world’s fairs, where art, architecture, and technology are deployed in the utopian modeling of the future. Conceived in 1994 and completed in 1999, the Millennium Dome was to be an architectural icon signifying the arrival of the new millennium at the Prime Meridian, on the Greenwich Peninsula. The prime meridian was designated 0° longitude in 1884, for the purpose of standardizing world time and adopting the universal day. Running directly through the primary telescope at the Royal Observatory, the prime meridian seeks to synchronize world time with the clockwork cosmos first idealized by Isaac Newton. Designed by Richard Rogers, also famed for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Millennium Dome was a futurist structure composed of translucent glass-fiber fabric, supported by twelve 100-meter masts protruding through the canopy. During the evenings a luminescent white glow emanated from the Dome, effected by interior lighting. The Dome spans 320 meters across, reaches 50 meters high, and encompasses over 80,000 square meters (or almost twenty acres), thus making it the largest domed structure ever built. Inside the Dome was the largest covered space on earth, capable of housing the Eiffel Tower lying on its side. The Millennium Dome was a vast nothingness to be filled with the future. Plagued by cost overruns and mismanagement, the 14 final price tag for the Millennium Dome and various exhibits exceeded £625 million, well over the original estimate of about £400 million. The Dome was to function like a giant exposition hall, housing the Millennium Experience, a variety of educational and entertainment exhibits structured like a theme park. Designed to be open for the duration of the year 2000, the Dome debuted on December 31, 1999, and closed on December 31, 2000. Attendance fell short of the original estimates of ten to twelve million, though, to be fair, the Dome’s six million visitors still made it the most popular attraction in London for the year and second only to Euro Disney in all of Europe. Yet, it seems the utopian future came in second to Disney, or perhaps the dominant utopian future is Disney! Inside the Millennium Dome were a dozen or so themed “zones,” each dedicated to a specific topic involving the human condition at the millennium. Some of the more popular zones included: Body: the most famous exhibit, offering a “voyage into the human machine”; visitors toured inside a giant human body (the size of the Statue of Liberty) accompanied by a pumping heart, brain activities, and other body functions. Mind: devoted to the inner workings of the human mind, complete with models of neural networks. Home Planet: a theme-park ride and multimedia experience about nature around the world; the exterior was composed of rows of TV screens and images. Living Island: a simulation of a traditional British seaside port, complete with beach, fish and chip stalls, deck chairs, and sea; the exhibit also explored the human impact on the environment. Other zones were dedicated to work, money, play, rest, faith, learning, journey (transportation), and self portrait (British culture), each designed and experienced much like a theme park attraction. The theme park nature of the event should not be surprising, for it illustrated the global influence of Disney’s vision of utopia and the future. Rather than an indictment of British officials, the Dome is an indictment of the global state 15 of utopia and the future. Promotional literature described the Millennium Dome as a “symbol for the new century” and “the most forward-looking place in the world to celebrate the year 2000 and our voyage into the next thousand years.” The zones were described as providing “windows to the future.” What are we to make of this new century and future? The Planet was experienced as a multimedia spectacle, and the Living Island was where ecology was studied in the simulation of a lost world, a British version of Biosphere 2 in Arizona. The Mind was mapped, and it looked like the structure of the Internet. Shortly after the event closed, the exhibits and everything interior were dismantled and removed, and later were auctioned off to interested bidders. The contents of the Dome were reduced to the equivalent of items in a fire sale of “the future.” By November 2001, everything inside had been leveled and the Millennium Dome was an empty cavern, containing only dust and debris from the dismantling. In less than a year, the Millennium Dome had gone from a world full of the future back to a world of empty nothingness. If this is a symbol of the new century, then it seems we have entered a disposable century, or an empty future, or perhaps a future already dead on arrival. That such may be the human condition is suggested by the fate of the Body, the giant human form that was the size of the Statue of Liberty. Apparently useless and too unwieldy, there were no bidders for the Body. What became of the remains? The Body was dissected and dismembered. The steel frame was recycled, and the rest of the carcass was buried, used as fill-in in a nearby hole! Barely into the new millennium, and the only full-time resident of the Dome is already dead, the human Body now decaying in its graveyard at the Millennium Dome. And, this graveyard is at the Prime Meridian no less. The Body entered the future at zero degrees and was buried shortly after at zero degrees, at the beginning and end of world time. All that remained of the Dome was the vast empty shell, with the protruding steel skeleton — the symbol of the future was a domed nothingness.8 16 zero time — the millennium clocks Say say two thousand zero zero party over/oops out of time/So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999. — Prince While the year 2000 was celebrated in the Millennium Dome, the time before the arrival of 2000 was counted down at the Millennium Clock in Paris. The time after the arrival of 2000 began to be counted at the Millennium Clock in the American desert, north of Las Vegas. In Paris, the Millennium Clock counted down to the end of the millennium, with electronic digits showing millions of seconds ticking down in digital perfection toward the year 2000. By 1999, there were many clocks around the world counting down to 2000, yet the Millennium Clock at the Centre Pompidou had been the first clock of the countdown, born after a 1979 Le Monde cover story about the thousand weeks before the year 2000. Designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, the Centre Pompidou is famed for having all its guts and skeleton — vents, ducts, wiring, escalators, and support structures — located on the exterior, an expression of pure functionalism meant to provide complete artistic freedom in the use of interior space. If the structural transparency of the Centre Pompidou signaled the completion of the modern architectural project, then the Millennium Clock suggested the exhaustion of the modern utopian project. The skeletal digits mounted on the skeleton of modernism indicated the “clockwork cosmos” — the model for the modern utopia — was running down, or out of time, now fully entropic as the chronograph of the future. As the end of the millennium approached, the ticking would only seem to accelerate, with the zeros increasing on the left side of the clock and eventually cascading in the final minutes and seconds to all zeros. In the cascade toward all zeros, the climax and completion heralded not only the end of the millennium but perhaps the end of the future. For Jean Baudrillard, the Millennium Clock illustrated 17 how time has become entropic in the exhaustion of all future possibilities. The modern utopia of progress and production is now the “final illusion of history,” for its vision no longer exists as a model of the future, already accounted for in the global countdown to zero.9 Perhaps the rock star Prince intuited these conditions with the lyrics — “two thousand zero zero party over, oops out of time” — to the apocalyptic dance hit 1999, which was released in 1982, shortly after the clock began ticking toward zeros in Paris.10 Such fate for the future became evident at the Clock of the Long Now. Arriving on the climatic day for the Millennium Clocks was a new kind of millennium clock, destined to exist in the desert and keep time for ten thousand years into the future. However, this millennium clock keeps time in a much different manner — the goal is to slow down time and space, to decelerate the arrival of the future. Thus, this millennium clock was named the Clock of the Long Now. So famed is the Clock of the Long Now that it has been celebrated in a 2005 cover story in Discover magazine and a popular book by Stewart Brand, appropriately titled The Clock of the Long Now.11 The first prototype for the Clock of the Long Now was completed on December 31, 1999. Following the cascade to zeros in Paris, the new cosmic chronograph would count ever so slowly, not ticking again until an entire year had passed. Designed by Danny Hillis, a guru of supercomputers and former Disney Imagineer, the Clock of the Long Now has analog hands that tick but once a year and a “century hand” that will advance once every hundred years. The cuckoo will emerge for each of the next ten millennia. The ten millennia symbolize the time frame from the year 2000 back to the first technological inventions around ten thousand years ago — the time span of technology in a single clock. Though designed with the aid of supercomputers, the Clock of the Long Now will be made of exotic Bronze Age materials chosen for maximum longevity and minimal friction, including nickelcopper alloys, tungsten carbide, metallic glass, and diamond coating for additional hardness.12 In designing the Clock, Hillis considered various power sources before deciding on a complex mechanical binary system, deploying mechanical versions of ones and zeros. With the Clock of the Long Now, the ones and zeros are given a retro mechanical form, a reversal of the virtualization and acceleration of information 18 effected by computers. Standing sixty feet tall, the final version of the Clock of the Long Now will be located in the American high desert, north of Las Vegas, in the Great Basin National Park. The first prototype is now on display at the Science Museum in London. Copies of the clock will stand in cities around the world. Poetically named by avant-garde music producer Brian Eno, the purpose for the Clock of the Long Now is to promote long-term thinking. In a deeper sense, the clock’s function is to symbolically decelerate the future, to slow down the arrival of tomorrow, thus giving humanity more time to contemplate the ultimate destiny for culture in a world of ceaseless innovation and perpetual acceleration. The Clock of the Long Now will be the slowest computer ever built.13 Counting time in much different manners, these clocks suggest parallel and paradox, pointing toward divergent and convergent destinies for utopia and culture. The Millennium Clock stood at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, while the Clock of the Long Now will stand in the Great Basin National Park in Nevada, on a limestone-crested mountain populated with four thousand year old bristlecone pine trees. Paris and Las Vegas are paradoxical destinies, for the Centre Pompidou is a hypermodern building in the most timeless of cities, while the Great Basin is a premodern and timeless setting near the most hyperreal of cities. Though the Millennium Clock was the first timepiece to offer the countdown, the Centre Pompidou was remodeled to celebrate the year 2000. So the Clock was removed to a storehouse at the Parc de la Villette (a public park and science museum), where it kept ticking in the dark for a long time, though no one could see it.14 Later, the Clock reappeared at the Place de la Bastille, marked by a traffic circle around the neoclassical Collone de Juillet (July Column), signifying the place where citizens “stormed the Bastille” to help inspire the French Revolution. Authorities mounted a new Millennium Clock on the Eiffel Tower, where it counted down the days, then, on the last day, the hours and seconds, only to fail a few hours before reaching 2000! The fate of the original Millennium Clock complemented this scenario. At first, the Clock was on the building that signaled the completion of the modern architectural project, then it was removed to tick in the dark, only to reappear at the site marking one of the beginnings of modern political 19 revolution. Meanwhile, numerous other millennium clocks continued the countdown around the world, a case of the clones and copies supplanting the original, which has receded into the past. Once completed, the Clock of the Long Now faces a similar fate, for apparently it too will be secured away in the past, while numerous copies stand in cities around the world. The Clock of the Long Now will stand in a cavernous chamber, carved into a limestone cliff in the high desert. This site was carefully chosen to provide safety from the corrosive effects of nature and culture. Inside the chamber, the Clock of the Long Now will be secured away from the modern world. Together, the destinies of the clocks symbolize the schizophrenia about the space-time parameters of utopia and the future. The Millennium Clock was ticking the seconds down to zero at the year 2000, and the Clock of the Long Now ticked but once at the year 2000, both pointing toward an exhaustion, perhaps the end of the future upon its arrival, its disappearance from the utopia of tomorrow. 20 ground zeros — fight club, new york, new orleans The trade-center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world. — Ada-Louise Huxtable Tomorrow was emptied from the Millennium Dome, while modernity exhausted itself at the Millennium Clock, and time is now being slowed down at the Clock of the Long Now. In New York, and around the world, time seemed to slow down on September 11, 2001, as the Twin Towers went from being to nothingness at Ground Zero. In the final destination of zero, the Twin Towers were hardly original, both becoming simulacra for the existential destiny of the information age. Further, it seems the fate of the Twin Towers was anticipated in Fight Club in 1995 and Las Vegas in 1999. If the modern utopian project sought to create “the best of all possible worlds” (however imperfect the results), then the postmodern utopian project seeks much less to create, than to recreate, to replicate and reproduce all previous worlds. This is the existential destiny of the information age — to replicate and reproduce, clone and copy. The Twin Towers anticipated this condition, debuting as models at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, the utopian event that celebrated the new “future” of the space age and information age. Conceived as a vertical world’s fair for the global village, permanently standing in the future of New York City, the Twin Towers were the first skyscrapers wired for electronic communication around the world, symbolized by the giant antennae. In 1973, when Tower two was topped off and completed, it immediately became the mirror of Tower one, thus making the monoliths into icons for the copy, the clone, the simulacra, the replay of the event which had already occurred, the destination that already had been reached, the tomorrow that was already past. The Twin Towers were cultural digits for the information age, icons of binary symmetry waiting for the countdown to (ground) zero. 21 On September 11, the terrorists not only blew holes in steel skyscrapers, they blew holes in electronic media screens around the world — the holes in the towers and screens represented a massive hole blown in political and cultural theory. Holes were blown in the computer and television screens, and eyewitnesses and viewers watched with mouths agape, hanging open, like holes in their faces, as they watched the horrific spectacle. Everyone was shocked and astounded, but the holes and the mouths agape for most of the following week said much more. On September 11, the United States slowed down and then came to almost a complete stop for nearly an entire week. Everything in the massive and dynamic American system had slowed down, temporarily achieving the ambition of The Clock of the Long Now. The attacks on the Twin Towers had created a massive singularity in American political and cultural theory, seemingly requiring a complete reassessing of the intellectual life and global cultural position of the United States. In the terms of Jean-Paul Sartre, we could also refer to that singularity as an existential moment for an entire society, where the social being was confronting a vast nothingness, waiting to be filled with thought and action. At that critical moment, there was complete freedom of thought and action as viewers gazed at the rubble of Ground Zero, from which rose a vast nothingness in the New York City skyline and the American culture. For a week or so, that singularity or nothingness was gaping open in the stunned silence of the American populace, mouths open but minds closed. Tragically, the singularity began to close rather quickly after that first week, just when religious leaders and intellectuals began to close off any new possibilities for theory, offering the same old theories — the endless anti-intellectual apologia for religion from both right and left, along with flag-waving patriotism from the right and critiques of militarism and imperialism from the left. All that the mass media could do was proclaim many heroes but pronounce zero new theories. Within a month, it was clear that the singularity had closed, for the negative feedback from left and right did not permit the cultural and political system to reach the point of singularity that would signal the emergence of a new intellectual regime. The nothingness was filled with the same 22 old thought and action. America could have taken a new turn intellectually and politically in the eyes of the world and, more importantly, in the eyes of itself. Sadly, the leaders and public chose not to do so. The intellectual and cultural stability of the old regime prevailed, and it was back to the twin towers of theory — the only task was to gather and generate new facts for old theories. Every analysis was merely hyper-empiricist, and there is nothing more empiricist than war. The onslaught of war paralleled the onslaught of facts, which masked the utter disappearance of alternative theory, at least the truly alternative theory not based in labyrinthine conspiracies. Not unlike the Body dismembered and buried at 0° at the Millennium Dome, those killed in the collapse of the towers were disintegrated and buried at a zero, beneath two skyscrapers of rubble at Ground Zero. Though conceived like world’s fairs to celebrate the future, the Millennium Dome and the Twin Towers both met unexpected fates — burials at two zeros, two funerals for a new future, now apparently dead on arrival.15 David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) offers another strange end-of-the-millennium anticipation of disappearing and destroyed skyscrapers, which also cannot be explained by conventional political theory. Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club depicts a violent rebellion against the consumer utopia and the modern world, centered on brutal fistfights among gangs of GQ men in an underground network of “fight clubs.” The movement had been organized by an alienated corporate drone named Jack (Edward Norton), under the inspiration of his alter ago named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), who took the physical form of a Luddite hipsterterrorist attired in urban grunge anti-fashion fashions. From fistfights, the movement expands its scope and ambition to detonating corporate public sculpture and destroying the skyscrapers of credit card companies, all in the effort to fully erase credit card debt, to get us to go “back to zero.” The film opens with Durden holding a gun in the mouth of Jack, accompanied by the following prophetic lines from Durden: Three minutes. This is it: ground zero. The film then flashes back to the origins of the fight club, with 23 the story of the birth and growth of the movement the focus of the plot for the duration of the film. As the fight club expands in membership and networks, we discover that Durden’s utopia is a premodern world, an agrarian-oriented hunter-gatherer society where people are attired in all-leather clothes and grow food amidst abandoned skyscrapers and superhighways. Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that Tyler Durden is an urban Unabomber, not theorizing in the forest and mail-bombing scientists, but acting on a much larger scale in the metropolis and bombing skyscrapers. In the conclusion to the film, we return to “ground zero.” Located in an unnamed skyscraper, ground zero in Fight Club is the view from a floor-to-ceiling window, looking toward the panorama of an urban skyline. From this vantage point, we see the implosion and collapse of several towering skyscrapers in cinematic imagery that is strikingly similar to the collapse of the Twin Towers two years later at Ground Zero in New York City. As the buildings implode, Jack says to his girlfriend Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter): “Trust me, everything’s gonna be fine. You met me at a very strange time in my life.” It was a very strange time in New Orleans as the global village watched in horror as another ground zero appeared in an American metropolis during the summer of 2005. The images were horrific — the Superdome and skyscrapers towered above a swamp, survivors stranded on highway overpasses and rooftops, and much of the citizenry reduced to hunter-gatherer status, all while the utterly corrupt government illustrated its ignorance and incompetence. Predictably, the issues of race and class have dominated the critical discourse about Katrina. However, we should not overlook the additional meanings in the flooding of New Orleans, meanings that offer a much more profound commentary on the state of contemporary culture. Hurricane Katrina fulfilled the apocalyptic prophecies of The Weather Channel. In January 2006, The Weather Channel launched the series It Could Happen Tomorrow, which focused on possible weather or geological apocalypses that could hit American cities — e.g., a hurricane flooding skyscrapers in New York City, a tornado destroying skyscrapers in Dallas, and a volcano pouring down on the Space Needle in Seattle. Echoing what planners have long known could happen, the first scheduled episode of It Could Happen Tomorrow was 24 about a Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans! Storm surge overwhelms the levees, thousands of people drown, and skyscrapers flood amidst an urban swamp. As the show was being produced, in summer 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, and the episode was withheld from public broadcast until summer 2006. Since Hurricane Camille in 1969, planners have known that a Category 4 or 5 hurricane would likely flood New Orleans with catastrophic results, yet the necessary upgrade of the levees (from Category 3 to 4 or 5) was not made by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Louisiana, or the city of New Orleans. The wetlands south of the city were allowed to steadily erode, reducing the natural hurricane buffer for the city. Meanwhile, the metropolis of New Orleans erected the Superdome in 1975 and pursued the postmodern economic utopias of tourism, sports, and media spectacles. Between 2001 and 2005, two of America’s largest architectural structures — both completed in the 1970s — were destroyed or severely damaged, suggesting a massive cultural reversal. The terrorists blew holes in the Twin Towers while Hurricane Katrina blew holes in the roof of the Superdome and the levees of New Orleans, the ground zeros of the apocalypse — the Fight Club future, where the postmodern future is engulfed by the premodern past, where media spectacle encounters intelligent design. 25 zeropolis — las vegas For us it is Zeropolis, the non-city which is the very first city, just as zero is the very first number. — Bruce Begout In the book Zeropolis (2002), Bruce Begout theorized Las Vegas as the zero metropolis, the city of nothingness and illusion, emptiness and nonexistence, evisceration and exploitation.16 While insightful in a certain sense, there is more going on in Las Vegas than mere gambling and empty aesthetics. Las Vegas is a microcosm of the fully mediated world extending around the planet and throughout global culture. A product of the postmodern utopian imagination, Las Vegas, with its seemingly magical qualities, possesses a clever cultural power. As Jean Baudrillard explained, it is by being seen as imaginary that Disneyland and Las Vegas save the reality principle — functioning as covers for the fact that the “real world” of the modern metropolis is no longer fully real or authentic. Disneyland and Las Vegas embody all the complexities of the postmodern media conditions, where the real and fictional are no longer dualities but are digitized and cloned in an endless series of reprogramming and reproduction. Strangely, it seems the events at Ground Zero in New York were anticipated in Las Vegas, at the hotel “New YorkNew York.” Like the Twin Towers in New York City, the hotel New York-New York signaled the double, the clone, the copy, the rise of the hyperreal. Opened in 1997, New York-New York is a vast simulation of various New York City icons, with a skyscraper skyline that features a half-size Statue of Liberty, forty-seven-story Empire State building, Chrysler building, Seagram building, New York Public Library, Grand Central Station, a three hundred foot long Brooklyn Bridge, and a Coney Island ferris wheel. Inside the hotel, tourists can dine in Greenwich Village or stroll along Times Square and Broadway. However, tourists at New York-New York have never been able to view the Twin Towers. 26 Of all the architectural landmarks in New York City, the skyline of New York-New York in Las Vegas never included the World Trade Center. Four years prior to their destruction in New York, the Twin Towers were omitted from the construction of New York-New York, effecting a disappearance of the towers that cannot be explained by the politics of right and left. In Xeroxing New York City, New York-New York deleted the two structures that most anticipated the rise of the clone and the copy — the Twin Towers!17 Like a map prophesying the absence of territories, the future of New York City was presaged in the simulacra of New York-New York. Capitol of the hyperreal, Las Vegas is where representation becomes reality, the map of yesterday that preceded the territory of tomorrow. While President Bush was reviled for encouraging Americans to “go to Disneyworld” in the wake of September 11, it seems that the territories of New York City had effectively entered the maps of Las Vegas, which, of course, were prefigured by Disneyland and Disneyworld. Rather than a nuclear apocalypse radiating from the Nevada Test Site, we are experiencing the virtual apocalypse exploding at Las Vegas, creating a different kind of vanishing point and a different kind of “ground zero.”18 27 zero universe — naqoyqatsi and the matrix The universe begins and ends with zero. — Charles Seife The media spectacle was extended to the entire universe in two movie trilogies — the Qatsi films of Godfrey Reggio and the Matrix films of the Wachowski brothers. While it is fashionable among most intelligentsia to trash The Matrix, the message of the film is exactly the same as the more poetic and cerebral Naqoyqatsi, namely that the real world is disappearing into the virtual world, where the zeros trump the ones in the mediated universe. Naqoyqatsi (2002) was the third installment in the Qatsi trilogy. In Koyaanisqatsi (1983) and Powaqqatsi (1992), Reggio used no dialogue or explanation, instead relying on an array of spectacular cinematic techniques to visually critique the accelerating industrialization and expanding globalization of the cultural worlds. Indeed, no words are necessary, for both documentaries are visually stunning. In Naqoyqatsi, Reggio realized that culture was accelerating beyond industrial technology, into an entirely technological existence. In describing Naqoyqatsi, Reggio was explicit: It’s not the effect of technology on society, on economics, on religion, on war, on culture, on art. It’s that everything now is existing in technology as the new host of life.19 Following in the wake of Marshall McLuhan, Reggio depicted a world in which media technology is not merely separating us from nature but is creating a global environment that encompasses human culture. The first images in Naqoyqatsi show a massive painting of the Tower of Babel, the lobby of a vast neoclassical building, now empty and abandoned, followed by a turbulent ocean, skies over a desolate landscape, which then became virtualized in a digital realm. These 28 images are followed by a nuclear blast, with people glowing like x-rays. The next image is the title — NAQOYQATSI. The modern world seems to have ended, apparently now destroyed by humans via advancing technology. Following the title, hurtling toward us is an accelerating barrage of stars, expanding in all directions. A zero emerges from the borders of the screen and recedes toward the vanishing point, while the stars accelerate toward us. Not perfectly round, the zero has a square-like shape, much like a computer font. The imagery suggests humanity has entered an expanding universe, yet we are in some kind of zero realm, some kind of nothingness. Slowly contracting in size, the zero disappears into the exact vanishing point from which stars are emerging and expanding. As the zero disappears, the stars accelerate from the vanishing point toward us, even faster, becoming a blur of pure light. Another computer zero then emerges, apparently from behind the exploding stars, accompanied by many other zeros and ones. Streaming horizontally across the screen, the strings of ones and zeros dissolve into exploding stars, followed by an image of earth ordered like the silicon circuitry of microchips. From this virtual earth, there emerges a barrage of ones and zeros, circuitry, spirals, satellites, planets, a computer, grids of light, the @ sign, many drawings of the solar system, models of molecules, electronic waves, models of the human brain, all the continents as silicon circuits, a CD opposite a human eye, and finally concludes with Michelangelo’s famous finger of God almost touching the finger of man. This barrage of images is followed by yet another big bang of cosmic light, which fades into a universe brimming with ones and zeros and computer circuitry, suggesting the silicon universe is now housed in Silicon Valley. The overall vision is that the empirical universe is disappearing within the virtual universe, the vanishing point for reality. The rest of the film is a cinematic meditation on the spectacle of mediated society, in all its forms, from celebrity to surveillance to sports to warfare. The Matrix (1999) tapped into the same zero imagery. The film begins with vertical columns of ever-changing green numbers, glowing and cascading down against a black background. The title — THE MATRIX — emerges from the glowing numbers. There follows more columns of cascading green numbers. Slowly zooming in on a single digit — 0 29 — moviegoers are propelled through the zero, through the vanishing point, into a mediated realm of nothingness, the virtuality of “the matrix.” Similarly, Matrix Reloaded (2003) opens with more green numbers pouring down a computer screen. Viewers are thrust through the “O” in RELOADED, into a universe of fractal and spiral galaxies, all receding at accelerating velocity while converging toward a single vanishing point. Matrix Revolutions (2003) opens by propelling moviegoers through the bottom arc of the “U” in REVOLUTIONS, whereupon viewers see a cosmic explosion of fractal and spiral galaxies emerging from a vanishing point, not unlike the cosmic imagery in Naqoyqatsi. The imagery in Naqoyqatsi and The Matrix trilogy depicts the paradoxical conditions of the information age, a journey into virtuality, the vanishing point, the zero, nothingness. In the final scenes of Naqoyqatsi, a skydiver jumps out of an airplane, but instead of falling toward Earth the skydiver chaotically floats and spirals away into the darkness of outer space. Perhaps there is no need to land on Earth, if the “Body” of the future has already been buried at zero degrees outside the Millennium Dome. The solitary human figure slowly disappears as the starry skies begin to rush away, also gradually disappearing, leaving only an empty universe. In concluding the “Qatsi” trilogy, Reggio depicts two expanding universes, with the empirical world fated to recede beyond the virtual world. At the end of the Qatsi trilogy, the cosmic condition facing humans seems unbearable; in The Matrix trilogy, this cosmic condition is also unbearable and is confronted by a retreat into superstition. Naqoyqatsi ends with a skydiver floating in the cosmos, while Matrix Revolutions concludes with a blind prophet (Neo) floating toward the sun in the virtual sky. After all the grand intellectual ambitions in the first film, The Matrix trilogy collapses into mythology and theology, for Reloaded and Revolutions are reactionary, not revolutionary. In Naqoyqatsi, there was no exit, only the drift toward nothingness, the zero. In Matrix Revolutions, there was only the evangelical exit, the blind belief and superstitious salvation of the fundamentalist future, the flat-earth future of bad sequels. 30 zero curvature — the flat screen cosmos If Matrix theory is true, it might mean that everything — strings, branes, and perhaps even space and time themselves — is composed of appropriate aggregates of zero-branes. — Brian Greene It would be easy to dismiss Naqoyqatsi and The Matrix as mere movies, with little meaning beyond their own mediated universes, were it not for the striking similarity between the films and the cosmology emerging from the edges of theoretical physics, especially “superstring theory.”20 Derived from complex equations and cosmological theory about the earliest moments of the big bang, superstring theory seeks to become “the theory of everything,” the theory that unites quantum mechanics (on the micro scale) with relativity (on the macro scale).21 Superstring theory posits that the most fundamental constituents of the universe are not particles of matter, as we might assume, but rather energy in the form of “superstrings.” Far smaller than any known particles, superstrings are believed to exist at the ultramicroscopic level, where strings of energy form circular loops or spheres. Like strings on a guitar that vibrate to generate music, the superstrings vibrate to generate matter, with the varying frequencies determining the patterns and forms of matter in the universe.22 For every point in normal four-dimensional space-time, superstrings are believed to exist in seven extra dimensions of space-time at the ultramicroscopic level, well beneath the perceptual powers of current technology (which is why the strings have yet to be empirically verified, though the equations strongly suggest their existence). Brian Greene modeled these strings as twisted textures of complex loops and spheres, which stitch together the micro and macro worlds as a sprawling cosmic “fabric,” or a vast “membrane,” upon which exists the world we inhabit.23 It is in this stitching together of micro and macro that superstring theory hopes to unify quantum mechanics and relativity, Heisenberg with Einstein. 31 In The Fabric of the Cosmos, Greene’s diagrams and descriptions suggest obvious parallels between the fabrics and membranes of the cosmos and the webs and networks of the Internet and cyberspace, that microscopic virtual world behind the electronic screens composed of strings of ones and zeros. Believed to be situated at the core of the loops and membranes are what scientists call “zero-branes,” ingredients of pure energy that occupy no spatial extent, the smallest dimension of the membrane of loops that make possible the spreading and smoothing of matter at the quantum level. Greene suggested the universe may be composed of “aggregates of zero-branes,” which some scientists refer to as “matrix theory.”24 Apparently, in the earliest moments of the big bang, the nonspatial energy generated “repulsive gravity,” the force that launched the cosmos on its inflationary trajectory over billions of years. The energy and mass became stars and galaxies, propelled apart by the expanding voids of empty space. Though almost nothingnesses, the voids are not completely empty, for they possess the force of repulsive gravity that spreads the universe apart and decreases its density, moving the universe toward (but never fully reaching) zero energy and zero density.25 According to Greene, the expanding voids are moving the cosmos toward “zero curvature,” meaning that as the universe spreads, the shape is likely to be flat, not spherical or circular.26 For Greene, the best way to imagine the shape of the universe is as a vast “movie screen” or “video game screen,” with the material world we inhabit existing on the surface of the flat screen that wraps back around to the other side as a continuous screen (without edges or end). Through our eyes and technology, we perceive the turbulent complexities of the microworld as we perceive the pixels on a television screen, where our eyes visually average the separate pixels into a smooth and continuous image.27 As Greene explains in The Fabric of the Cosmos, it is upon the flat-screen cosmos that the ever-expanding emptinesses eventually send the galaxies receding from view. Drawing from another media metaphor, Greene concluded by theorizing that the universe may function as a vast hologram, not unlike the holograms on everyday credit cards.28 Holograms are two-dimensional pieces of plastic, etched by laser beams to project three-dimensional images, which are revealed when illuminated by an ample light 32 source. Based on Stephen Hawking’s work on black holes, recent research suggests that the maximum entropy (disorder) for any area of space-time exists on the surface of the region and not within its volume. This means the cosmic unfolding of order and disorder happens on the cosmic surface. Combining the screen and hologram metaphor, Greene concluded that the laws of physics could be the laser for the cosmos — existing on a thin surface and illuminated to reveal “the holographic illusions of daily life.”29 Apparently, we can imagine the big bang as the vanishing point upon a distant horizon of the past from which the universe began its exponential expansion toward us, now spreading apart as a flat-screen cosmos, with us inhabiting the world projected upon the screens of superstrings. If the universe continues expanding, as it seems destined to do (unless dark matter or some other gravity inducing substance is verified), the flat screen cosmos will become the cosmic vanishing point, the horizon upon which the universe recedes from view in all directions, while each galaxy slowly exhausts its energies. Entering the millennium, the latest in big bang and superstring theory suggests a cosmic trajectory from zero-branes to zero curvature, from infinite density and energy toward zero density and zero energy. 33 coke zero — soft drink simulacrum You could say that the Big Mac is the degree zero of food, that Coke is the degree zero of drinks. — Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard referred to Coke as the “degree zero of drinks,” meaning that Coke, along with brand names such as Big Mac, are representative of the “vanishing points” for the cultural universals of modernity (enlightenment, progress, democracy, and so on), all now being supplanted by total technological globalization. If Coke is the zero degree of drinks, then what is Coke Zero, the new brand from the Coca-Cola Company? According to the zero formula, Coke Zero has zero sugar, zero calories, and zero carbohydrates, apparently meaning that the drink provides little for energy and nothing to increase the density of body fat, though apparently it still retains some caffeine for a quick hit. Coke Zero is supposed to taste like Coke Classic, the “real thing” Coke, yet the real taste of Coke Zero is but a simulated taste made possible with the simulation of sugars, the simulation of sweetness. So far, it seems the Zero concept has been successful as the Coca-Cola Company has also introduced Sprite Zero and Slice Zero. Whatever the long-term success or failure of Coke Zero in the marketplace, much more revealing is the nature of Coke Zero and the utopianism of the publicity campaign, which explicitly expressed the zero condition, with ideas and images similar to many other artworks and films. The publicity for Coke Zero centered on a television advertisement that sampled and reinterpreted one of the most popular TV ads of all time, the 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop” commercial. Filmed on a hillside in Italy, the 1971 Hilltop commercial featured about forty people (under the age of thirty) of numerous nationalities, drawn from foreign embassies in Rome, with many dressed in fashions unique to their cultures and territories, such as kimonos and tunics. With the camera panning from face to face, the group sings: 34 I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love, Grow apple trees and honey bees, and snow white turtle doves. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company. It’s the real thing, Coke is what the world wants today. Coca-Cola. It’s the real thing. As the camera pulls away from overhead, the advertisement concludes with the image of a full bottle of Coca-Cola superimposed on the center of the screen above the singers along with the words: “It’s the real thing. Coke.” Apparently, the Coca-Cola Company was implying that these are the “real people” of the world, the future leaders of a global village harmoniously united by the “real thing” of Coke. The Coke Zero commercial was called “Chilltop,” and it was filmed on an urban rooftop near the skyscrapers of downtown Philadelphia, with about a dozen singers and musicians seemingly under the age of thirty. The lead vocalist is a musician named “G-Love,” who sings the main lyrics in a semi-rap style, while the chorus follows the melody of the Hilltop song. The song goes as follows: Lyrics: I’d like to give the world a break, put a smile on your face. As I erase the stress from the rat race, so you can chill. Chorus: I’d like to teach the world to chill, take time to stop and smile. I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and chill with it a while. Lyrics: Sometimes you need to relax when things get rough’n 35 So turn off your phone and let me tell you a little something about chill’n. You got everything you need in the palm of your hand, Peace, love, and unity throughout all the land. Yeah, get together everybody, that’s what I’m talking about! Chorus: It’s a simple thing, what the world wants today. It’s a simple thing. To deal with the stress of the rat race, Coke Zero was promoted as helping us enter a chill state of mind while contemplating the utopian clichés of peace, love, and unity. Throughout the commercial there are images of the singers on the rooftop, along with some random urban street scenes, apparently meant to convey “reality” and “authenticity,” the very things absent in Coke Zero and the commercial. As G-Love sings “you got everything you need in the palm of your hand,” the camera cuts to a close-up of Coke Zero in someone’s hand, followed by the line about peace, love, and unity. If the 1971 Hilltop singers expressed the “flower power” ethos of the sixties generation and some looked as if they were blissful refugees from hippie communes, then the 2005 Chilltop singers expressed the faux power of the MTV generation and some looked like bland refugees from the urban communes of The Real World, adorned in the pseudo-authenticity of T-shirts and urban grunge, with all the coolness of counterfeit individuality. From communing in nature to communing on television, from seeking the real to seeking the simulated, this has been the dominant trajectory of culture over the past several decades, in forms imagined as utopian and dystopian by theorists and critics. The trajectory from real to simulated is expressed in the final words and images, for as the last lines are sung, the group stands up and hoists their Coke Zeros toward the skyscrapers, as if offering a toast or salute to the Philadelphia skyline. Yet the skyscrapers are far from towering or imposing, for the skyline seems to be receding behind the shifting horizon, brightly illuminated with either a sunrise or sunset. Sunrise or sunset, it doesn’t matter, for new day or end of the day, the message has the same meaning. The skyscrapers are 36 receding toward the vanishing point, and superimposed over the vanishing point is a Coke Zero bottle, but only in the form of a white outline, unlike the full bottle at the end of the 1971 Hilltop ad. From full bottle to empty bottle, an outlined bottle of Coke Zero was appropriate, for Coke Zero is a simulacrum of the original Coke, disappearing as its function was emptied and its flavor was simulated — Coke Zero is the vanishing point of Coca-Cola. And it is with this soft drink simulacrum that the MTV global villagers are saluting the skyscrapers, precisely as the skyline is receding toward the vanishing point, a world receding behind the simulacrum of Coke Zero. Coke Zero is not the real thing, it is the simple thing. If “the real thing” is the complexity of reality, then “the simple thing” seems to be the simplicity of simulated reality. Simulation and simplification — these are the very existential conditions that dominate global discourse, revealed in the popularity of theme parks and the rise of fundamentalism, where empirical complexity is confronted with epistemological simplicity regardless of existential reality, that universe which is the ultimate “real thing.” 37 count zero interrupt I’ve been thinking...that in a minute that computer is going to start beeping and when it does, you’re gonna let it go, you’re gonna let it run down to zero, past zero. — Locke, key character on the cult television show Lost. The zero condition is poetically fictionalized in William Gibson’s Count Zero (1986).30 Gibson is perhaps the most influential science fiction writer of the past quarter-century and is best known for the novel, Neuromancer (1984), in which he coined the term “cyberspace” and poetically theorized it as existing within a vast global computer network, the backbone of a complex sprawling transnational information economy.31 In effect, Gibson hacks the future, the world of entropic modernity, the trajectories of a culture fully penetrated by technology. In Count Zero, the computer hackers are metaphors for us today, like theorists grappling with the postmillennial patterns of global change, like technologists trying to see the future, trying to plot the trajectories of tomorrow. The future is represented by the emerging technologies, especially the new space-time realm of cyberspace and computers. The struggle to see the future is symbolized by the hackers, seeking to penetrate the vast databases in cyberspace, a cosmic realm of staggering immensity and complexity, symbolizing a technological future of shifting patterns impossible to grasp except as fragments: … the infinite reaches of that space that wasn’t space, mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate datacores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the nearest outline.32 Whenever the hackers begin to grasp the overall patterns in the information of cyberspace, the massive system automatically shifts its alignments into new and complex forms: 38 Complex geometric forms began to click into place in the tank, aligned with the nearly invisible planes of a three-dimensional grid … A new set of geometries replaced the first arrangement. … The scale of the thing was impossible, too vast, as though the kind of cybernetic megastructure … he’d seen the big thing, the thing that had sucked them up, start to alter and shift, gargantuan blocks of it rotating, merging, taking on new alignments, the entire outline changing ….33 With the hackers and shifting patterns of data, Gibson was suggesting that once we try to get an overall perspective on understanding the technological future, it seems to automatically shift into new patterns, new alignments, leaving us bewildered, yet awed at this gigantic specter that seems to be everywhere but visible only in fragments or as outlines upon the horizons of tomorrow. Like the certainty of the planets revolving around the Sun in Newton’s clockwork cosmos, it was once imagined that the revolution of the modern utopia — the mechanized metropolis — would inexorably envelope the world following the laws of industrial technology, propelling humanity on to a smoothly efficient trajectory into the space-time coordinates of a scientific, secular tomorrow. This future would arrive with certainty, like products rolling off the assembly line. Or the future was destined to arrive, residing on the hands of an electric watch, never needing any rewinding, always ticking into the technological tomorrow. Twentieth century science and culture proved these notions misguided, and now absent the certainties of modernity, it seems the trajectory of the future has been seriously interrupted, now seeming to be a Count Zero world of shifting, uncertain, discontinuous territories, full of voids and singularities. In Count Zero, one of the hackers goes by the name of “Count Zero,” derived from the old computer programming concept of “count zero interrupt.” Gibson used the quote at the beginning of this book as the opening to Count Zero, suggesting that the future is experiencing count zero interrupt. Count zero interrupt has two basic meanings. One is when a computer has reached its limit in trying to perform or 39 complete a programmed function, which might cause endless loops or a computer crash. Upon reaching “count zero,” the computer launches into another function to prevent endless loops or performs diagnostics that try to heal the computer by returning the system to the “last known good state.” The second meaning is when a personal computer fails to reboot after many attempts; it then reaches “count zero” and says: “now what?” The computer might then say: “press here to try again,” “press here to quit,” “press here to return to the last known good state,” “press here for safe mode.” The computer might also try to reboot itself by having an internal clock that ticks to zero and then signals for a reboot. Thus, the countdown to zero can be reached by the number of attempts to reboot or in the time reached to reboot. So, perhaps modernity and the future have reached the endgame, now fated to a series of endless loops, going from revolutions to replays. Perhaps the future has crashed, yet to be rebooted, which was Baudrillard’s suggestion about the Millennium Clock in Paris. The future crashed at the Millennium Dome in London. Many thought Y2K would crash the future, unaware it has masked the crash of the future. Or perhaps the future has launched into a diagnostic program, seeking to heal itself by returning to “last known good state,” not unlike the biospheric aims of ecological utopianism, not unlike the technological reversal sought by the Unabomber, not unlike the cultural reversals sought by fundamentalism, not unlike the nostalgia for the yesteryear architecture of New Urbanism, Disneyland, and Las Vegas hotels. The utopian ambition of The Clock of the Long Now is to slow down the future, to permit a diagnostic on technological change and cultural evolution. Ground Zero in New York signaled the need for a massive diagnostic in America, which lasted about two weeks, and then it was back to the standard modes of thought. Ground Zero in New Orleans produced the same diagnosis. Maybe all the zeros simply mean: “Okay, we built the modern project, and it has its flaws, so now what?” Walking through a retail bookstore gives the impression that hardly anyone is happy, as therapy and self-help books sell by the millions; the therapists and gurus are telling everyone to reprogram themselves, to keep on trying — “press here to try again.” Everywhere we can see apathy, alienation, ambivalence, and anti-intellectual ignorance and hostility 40 toward science and secular modernity — “press here to quit.” The quitters are being confronted by the faithful and the pseudo-certainties of theology and fundamentalism — “press here and return to the last known good state: the garden of Eden.” Perhaps the internal clocks of the future have reached zero, signaling the need for a reboot, as suggested by computer-mediated dystopias in Naqoyqatsi and The Matrix. Finally, maybe the count zero interrupt simply means: “let’s re-boot and give it another shot.” Count zero interrupt seems to exist on the isle of Lost (2004-present), the cult television show about plane crash survivors marooned on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. In one sense, Lost is about surviving the crash of modernity, confronting the conditions of technological and cosmic vertigo. Surviving a plane crash, unplugged from the global networks of electronic media, their cell phones and laptops useless, the prospects for rescue slim. Removed from the modern technological world, the survivors are quickly propelled backward across the millennia, to living as huntergatherers and cave people. As they quickly learn, the tropical paradise is no utopia without technology. The survivors are lost, in both space and time — they do not know where they are or when they are.34 In another sense, Lost is about confronting the count zero interrupt. By the time of the second season finale, some survivors had discovered a mysterious underground facility, which housed a set of computers that seemed to be programmed around a digital clock that is always ticking down toward zero. Also inside the facility is a survivor of a previous crash on the island, and he informs them that they must never let the digital clock tick down to all zeros, otherwise there will be an apocalypse that will destroy their world. Some survivors believe him and dedicate themselves to making sure the clock does not reach zero by entering code numbers and pushing the “execute” button to reset the clock. Others believe it is nonsense and merely some kind of system of simulation, an experiment designed to keep them fearful and under control on the ever more mysterious island. By resetting the computer, the character of Locke believes they are merely “puppets on strings,” the toys of someone else’s devious scientific experiments and are doomed to “never be free.” Desmond, the survivor from the previous crash, tells 41 them that the zeros would trigger a “system failure,” followed by a massive “electromagnetic” disturbance. Further, Desmond relates what happened the one time he accidentally let the clock tick past zero — the electromagnetic disturbance caused the crash of the jetliner that brought the survivors to the island. As the clock approaches zero, Locke smashes the control monitor and keyboard. The clock reaches zero, hieroglyphic symbols appear. The computer repeatedly announces: “System Failure … System Failure … System Failure.” Unleashed are all kinds of powerful magnetic forces, the facility begins to vibrate loudly, and electric circuits explode. Metal attracts to metal, hurling small and large objects through the air, including monitors and mainframe computers. The metal housing for the clock crumples inward, crushing the clock face, like an implosion of space-time. The season finale ends with Desmond executing a fail-safe procedure to effect “system termination.” So here we are, humanity moving ever further beyond 2000, the year that symbolized the new millennium, once full of utopian possibilities. Are we lost, no longer able to navigate a technological future with its trajectories interrupted, perhaps with the system terminated? Must we reverse culture back to a last known good state, toward the utopian myths of fundamentalism and the Unabomber? Absent technology, the garden is a jungle. Are we fated to a future that is no longer the future, a future that has reached its limit, or is stuck in endless loops, or, diagnostics unsuccessful, a future that has simply crashed. Is there a button to reboot tomorrow? 42 carbon zero tomorrow — global warming We can even make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions down to zero. — Al Gore Can we reboot tomorrow? The Live Earth concert in 2007 surely evoked this possibility, with the SOS-zero logos suggesting not only ground zero for ecological apocalypse, but also the zero for blasting off into a carbon zero tomorrow. In 2006, former United States Vice President Al Gore also thought so, especially if we can return to zero, to zero carbon emissions. Gore concluded that we have no choice but to reboot tomorrow, otherwise the trajectory of modern civilization will be seriously interrupted by the effects of global warming. In the book and Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Gore presented the case that modernity must immediately adapt its technologies to eliminate carbon emissions, to avert a dystopian apocalypse by moving toward a zero-carbon tomorrow. It was the success of this film that inspired the Live Earth concerts. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore deployed vivid graphics, charts, and video imagery to illustrate four basic themes — the science of global warming, followed by the effects, causes, and possible long-term remedies. Regarding the science of global warming, Gore began by explaining the importance of the atmosphere to life on earth, along with the fragile thinness of the atmosphere relative to the size of the planet. Citing famed scientist Carl Sagan, Gore noted that the thickness of the atmosphere is equivalent to a coat of varnish on a globe.35 This thin layer helps regulate the planet’s temperature, absorbs the sun’s energy, generates weather patterns, and makes possible most life on earth, especially human life. However, human activities have been changing the composition of the atmosphere via the introduction of additional amounts of “greenhouse gases” — mainly carbon 43 dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Greenhouse gases are a natural part of the atmosphere, functioning like a greenhouse to trap some of the sun’s energy and warm the planet.36 As Gore explained, the greenhouse gas that poses the greatest danger is carbon dioxide, which is released into the air by the burning of fossil fuels — oil, coal, and natural gas. By converting fossil fuels into energy to power the mechanized metropolises, humans have been increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is trapping more of the Sun’s energy and thus functioning to warm the planet. Scientists of global warming have concluded there is a causal correlation between increasing greenhouse gases and increasing temperatures on earth, both in the air and in the oceans. Gore noted the near unanimity among global warming scientists that the earth’s atmosphere and oceans are increasing in temperature. Such a wide consensus exists among scientists, though there seems to be debate about the rate of warming and the scale of the negative effects, disagreements based on conflicting data and computer models. In other words, global warming seems to be a fact, while the magnitude of the human-caused effects are not yet fully known, mainly because of the complexity of chaotic systems like the earth’s biosphere. Ultimately, global warming is grounded in the Gaia hypothesis, the concept that the planet is a single living organism, a mega-system in which the evolution of life and the evolution of earth are a complex totality. Gore detailed two chief causes of global warming — the population explosion and modern industrialization. Human population has dramatically increased during the modern era, from 1 billion in 1776 to 2.3 billion in 1945, 6.5 billion in 2006, and a projected 9.1 billion in 2050.37 This exponential growth has been partially a success story for modernity and technology. Death rates have been declining and most people are living longer. While birth rates now seem to be declining around the world, the inertia effect of the explosion is that the population is still expanding dramatically, especially in developing nations and their sprawling metropolises. The population explosion has been driving demand for food, water, energy, and mass-produced goods, all of which increases consumption of natural resources and strains the environmental systems. Throughout the book and film, Gore presented a vast array of environmental statistics as evidence 44 that global warming is being produced by the fossil fuels that power the technologies of modern industrial culture, in all its forms, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century.38 Currently the industrialized nations account for the largest contributions to increasing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming — United States (30.3% of greenhouse gases), Europe (27.7%), and Russia (13.7%). As the developing nations industrialize, they, too, will increase significantly the amount of greenhouse gases, if their mechanized metropolises are powered with fossil fuels. In presenting the effects of global warming, Gore was nothing less than dystopian and apocalyptic, not unlike the climatic prophecies of The Weather Channel’s It Could Happen Tomorrow. Gore suggested that the warmer atmosphere and oceans are increasing the quantity and intensity of naturally turbulent weather phenomena — hurricanes, typhoons, and tornados.39 Gore even suggested that the power and devastation of Hurricane Katrina was increased by global warming. About the conditions in New Orleans, Gore wrote: It was like a nature hike through the book of Revelation.40 Gore explained that weather patterns are being altered, species threatened, diseases spread, permafrost melted, coral reefs endangered, and the Gulf Stream potentially disrupted.41 On the largest scales, global warming also threatens to melt the world’s glaciers and polar ice caps.42 Melting glaciers may cause a serious shortage of drinking water for forty percent of the world’s population, while melting ice caps will raise ocean levels by twenty feet, thus flooding many coastal cities around the world.43 The site of the World Trade Center Memorial is shown under water. The essence of Gore’s apocalyptic conclusion can be understood in terms of chaos theory. Population explosion and industrialization are combining to strain the environment in many ways, thus generating a complex runaway feedback system that causes natural phase transitions in the atmosphere and oceans to go from subtle to explosive to catastrophic, to a point where the effects cannot be slowed or reversed, to a moment of singularity that signals massive transformation. Thus, early in the new millennium, it seems clear 45 that there have been many unanticipated byproducts and unintended consequences of modern industrialization. The byproducts have been increasing greenhouse gases and global warming, while the consequences of these byproducts are serious climate change that threaten civilization. In the final part of the book and film, Gore argues that the only solution is to significantly reduce or eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels, moving toward a zero-carbon tomorrow. Drawing from a vast body of green literature, Gore then provides a lengthy list of eco-friendly steps that must be taken to reach the zerocarbon tomorrow. In the end, Gore concluded that modern technological civilization has crashed into the ecological systems of the earth, a dystopian condition that spans the borders and divides of the political and cultural worlds. The issue is not political, but rather moral and spiritual. Gore declared: The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise. (…) When we rise, we will experience an epiphany as we discover that this crisis is not really about politics at all. It is a moral and spiritual challenge. At stake is the survival of our civilization and habitability of the Earth.44 (italics in original) Mission, moral purpose, unifying cause, spiritual challenge, the opportunity to rise — these concepts are deeply utopian, especially when they are viewed as necessary to preserve modern civilization. Gore hoped these utopian ambitions would inspire citizens around the world to move toward a zero-carbon tomorrow, to insure that the trajectory of the future is not interrupted.45 Since we hear similar utopian phrases uttered with impunity by power-hungry politicians, it is easy to be cynical in ignoring the deeper patterns, easy to remain in the comfort zones of the usual political party lines and cultural divides. 46 Gore was correct that the crisis is “not really about politics at all.” Yet the challenge is not merely moral or spiritual, for the existential condition Gore has identified is the colliding trajectory of modernity, seemingly destined for dystopia and apocalypse. The deepest challenge is grasping the global collision of utopian and dystopian models of the world. As illustrated throughout this book, Gore’s dystopian conclusion about the trajectory of modernity and the utopian vision of a zero-carbon tomorrow share deep parallels with numerous other dystopian millennial events involving zeros, which collectively span the globe and cannot be assimilated under the conventional party lines and cultural divides. Indeed, theory is colliding with reality. 47 utopia 2000 in paris and new york When philosophers announce the “end of grand narratives,” when it is said that there is no philosophical basis for Enlightenment beliefs in Truth, Reason, Science, Progress, it is hard to see how utopia, which tends to believe in most of those things, can survive. — Krishnan Kumar It seems difficult to imagine any prospects for utopia, especially in an era when world wars kill millions, nuclear and biological weapons proliferate, AIDS ravages a continent, scientists warn of global warming, terrorists destroy skyscrapers, SUV-powered suburbia continues to sprawl, scientists clone sheep while cults claim to clone children, privacy is disappearing behind the screens of total surveillance, and theme parks are the most popular tourist destinations around the world. Yet, such phenomena illustrate the entropy of modernity, the breakdown of the modern utopian project around the world. This is why premodern and/or antimodern utopianism have been resurrected in the form of fundamentalism, evangelicalism, Luddism, deep ecology, and so on. Utopian theory has always been one of the “grand narratives” of human culture, spanning the millennia — from premodern to modern to postmodern — to provide models of the world that guided the trajectories and destinies of humanity and culture, models that shaped the forms and functions of society. Utopian theory also confronts zero conditions, which were apparent in the void of new utopian theory offered by the international collection of scholars represented at the 2000 exhibition, Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, co-presented by Bibliotheque Nationale de France and The New York Public Library. This massive panorama documented the utopian and dystopian visions that have shaped Western culture, from millennialism to modernism, artistic revolution to industrial science, agrarian communes to twentieth century totalitarianism, and many utopian-dystopian counter reactions.46 The utopian and dystopian history was excellent, yet when it came to providing 48 any new utopian theory for the new millennium, there was hardly anything, a utopian zero for tomorrow. Though the Utopia exhibit was impressive and informative, the overwhelming majority of the exhibit stressed utopian theory prior to the twentieth century. Regarding the twentieth century, the majority of the coverage stressed utopianism and dystopianism before World War II. The brief review of the latter half of the twentieth century seemed mostly an afterthought, and any utopian models entering the millennium were hardly mentioned. There were numerous artifacts at the Utopia exhibition, including maps of utopian cities and territories, various utopian models and architectural renderings, and many famed artworks and utopian books, plus some rather obscure utopian imagery. The coffee-table book accompanying the exhibit included many photos of these artifacts and several fascinating articles about utopia and dystopia in history. Considering the comprehensive ambitions of the Utopia exhibition and book, there were key thinkers and topics that remained largely ignored or utterly overlooked. These omissions were revealing. Though electronic media are central to understanding postmodernity, the scholarly essays in the book Utopia had only a very brief mention of media technologies, such as television or computers. Krishan Kumar included one paragraph on computers and the “information society,” while Lymon Tower Sargent offered a paragraph on the Internet in the essay about utopia in “the late twentieth century.”47 Cinema merited a few brief mentions, including a very incomplete list of utopian and dystopian films, with numerous omissions of media-oriented films. Other than a brief mention of Celebration, Florida, there was no discussion of the global influence of Walt Disney and Disneyland. Marshall McLuhan’s utopian and dystopian media theories were not mentioned, which seems surprising, given the common use and misuse of the term “global village.” Two of the most influential postmodern theorists are William Gibson and Jean Baudrillard, and both were viewed as essentially dystopian and merited a mere one sentence in the book. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” and developed its theoretical constructs in several science fiction novels, while Baudrillard’s theory of simulation and the hyperreal offered a radical assessment of the cultural conditions generated by electronic media, computers, virtuality, theme 49 parks, and so on. Amidst the many maps of past utopias displayed at the exhibition, there were apparently zero maps of the future utopias or dystopias. In other words, if one wants to understand the future, or anticipate the future, do not look to models of utopia. Overall, the exhibition expressed an amusing paradoxical condition. In the year 2000, the world’s most esteemed utopian scholars hosted the Utopia exhibition in two of the great libraries of the world, in two of the world’s great cities, Paris and New York, yet the exhibition offered little mention or treatment of the future of utopia and dystopia entering the millennium, precisely as Las Vegas clones the cities of Paris and New York in the utopian simulacra of “Paris, Las Vegas” and “New York-New York.” When billions of dollars are deployed to clone cities, and the famed utopian scholars seem oblivious or clueless, then theory and any possible utopian future seem to have entered some kind of vanishing point. Should we be surprised that the superstitions of fundamentalism and religion are proliferating unchecked around the world, with mythical deities promising mystical destinies, situated somewhere beyond yesterday, in premodern promised lands and spiritual golden ages? 50 circles and zeros The circle is utopia’s first figure. — Laurent Gervereau Zero was dangerous (...) inexorably linked with the void — with nothing. — Charles Seife To understand the symbolic meanings of the zero, perhaps one place to start is with its opposite — the circle. The circle was the first idealized form for modeling utopia, with many symbolic meanings over the millennia — the shape of the sun and the earth, the starry skies seeming to circle around the world, the eternal form, the epicenter of truth, the womb giving birth, the circle of the eye, the island surrounded by water, the dome over our capitols, the society secured from the world, the closed or secret society, the orbit of the planets around the Sun, the shape of the atom, the geodesic dome, the sphere of human consciousness.48 The circle is a microcosm of utopian theory, a physical and mental space ready to be filled with a model of the world, however imagined. Centuries ago, Pythagoras believed the universe was made of mathematical ratios, the product of “the music of the spheres.” The Greeks believed the circle mirrored the motion of the stars, which moved in perfect circles on the heavenly spheres. Plato’s Atlantis was the first circular utopia, for situated on the mythical island was a complex city structured in a series of concentric circles — rings alternately of land and water. Each ring of land contained various wonders of art and scenic nature, and the rings were connected over the circles of water via numerous bridges, engineering marvels for the time. At the center of the circular city was the Citadel, the palace of the gods, surrounded by towering walls of gold and giant statuary. Over time, the Atlanteans became intoxicated with greed and world power. After a military defeat at the hands of Athens, the utopia-turned-dystopia was destroyed in an apocalypse of earthquakes and hurricanes, and thus disappeared forever beneath the ocean.49 Atlantis went from being to nothingness, from circle to zero. 51 Across the millennia, from the circle and sphere would flow the central forms for ordering human existence, the eternal forms for utopian design on Earth and a promised destiny into the future. The 2000 Utopia exhibit and accompanying coffee-table book provided many examples of the circle as ideal and model, including circular maps of the world, circular and radial city plans, domed buildings, planetariums, and utopian circles in the visual and graphic arts of constructivism, socialism, and modernism.50 The cover for the 2000 Utopia book was a giant circle, the sphere of a planetarium designed in tribute to Isaac Newton. Today, string theorists claim the universe is made of circular and spherical loops of energy, which vibrate to generate the matter of the cosmos. On the other hand, the circle has its own opposition, in the form of zero. The circle is the first form for an ideal world and the zero is the first number in the real world, the nothingness from which we begin counting all things real and imaginary.51 Though zero is usually associated with a lack or a nothing, zero can be powerful and paradoxical. A zero added to the end of any number amplifies the quantity by a factor of ten, as from one to ten to one hundred and so on. Multiplying by zero reduces a number to zero, while dividing a number by zero produces infinity. Zero counters infinity, the nothingness that haunts the unlimited possibilities of a transformed world. The zero is the starting point for counting up and the end point for countdowns. Zero ends the countdowns for rockets to the starry skies, and ground zero is the detonation point for rockets with atomic bombs. The Fallout Shelter signs from the Cold War illustrate this condition, for the circle — with triangles signaling radiation — becomes the sign for the zero, the ground zero of an atomic bomb. As counted by the Millennium Clock in Paris, zero is the end point for an old millennium, and zero is the starting point for a new millennium, as timed by the Clock of the Long Now in Nevada. The circle emptied of meaning or content is the zero. The mirror of the circle is the zero, the reflection without content, the representation without reality. In the binary system of digital technology, 1 is the number for on and 0 is the number for off, or, understood another way, one equals representation and zero equals nonrepresentation — ones 52 and zeros, being and nothingness. If the circle is the first form for utopia, then perhaps the proliferation of zeros signals the end of any utopian possibility for modernity. 53 ends and beginnings In the void left by the universal, the stakes have risen. — Jean Baudrillard The zero conditions offer striking insights into the fate of the future in the new millennium. The zeros symbolize ends, exhaustions, reversals, emptinesses, nothingnesses, voids, and singularities, all pointing toward the strange conditions confronting the trajectory of modernity: • The ends are symbolized by the zeros of Y2K, the Millennium Dome, the Live Earth SOS logo, Gore’s zero-carbon lifestyle needed to prevent the effects of global warming. • The exhaustions are symbolized by zeros on the Millennium Clock, the Clock of the Long Now, and the countdown to zero on Lost. • The reversals are symbolized by the Ground Zeros in New York, New Orleans, and Fight Club. • The emptinesses are symbolized by the zeromediated universes in Naqoyqatsi and The Matrix, the Zeropolis of Las Vegas, and Coke Zero. • The nothingnesses and voids are symbolized by the zeros of string theory and the big bang. • The zeros, voids, and singularities are depicted in Count Zero Interrupt. • The “theme of zero” also signals a cultural singularity, most evident in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. Like the old computer code, the global clock seems to have reached many zeros — count zero interrupt — suggesting that the program of the modern technological and secular future has been interrupted, having reached its limit in performing its functions. Perhaps modernity has entered an endless series of loops or is performing diagnostics on the fate of tomorrow, now searching for the last known good state 54 of culture. Maybe modernity is continually trying to execute a reboot of the future, or has failed to reboot and the future has completely crashed. In the famed report on the state of human knowledge, Jean-Francois Lyotard concluded we “no longer have recourse to the grand narratives.”52 By this, Lyotard meant that humanity does not share any grand (utopian) visions that unite science with society in creating a model for world culture. Modern narratives like “science,” “progress,” and “enlightenment” claim to possess objective truth or universal validity that transcend eras or societies, yet Lyotard concluded that such “metanarratives” are largely mythic, operating within modes of self-perpetuating discourses that may or may not have claims on truth or reality. Even though technological globalization is advancing around the world, utopian values such as “enlightenment,” “humanism,” and “liberation” no longer remain unchallenged or embraced without reservation. These values are often outright rejected by fundamentalists and evangelicals around the world. There is now a gaping void in theorizing the secular utopia for a global civilization. Baudrillard observed that many of modernity’s ideals and values have lost authority and authenticity, precisely as globalization has swept around the world, offering an explosion of group identities and personal lifestyles in a fragmented and mediated global village. Coca-Cola and Big Mac are representative of the global brands supplanting universal philosophy. Or perhaps these products are the philosophy, as illustrated by Coke Zero, where global media and global brands represent the “vanishing points” of universal values, emptying universality of intellectual content and then offering a proliferation of copies, simulation, and reproductions as vacuous symbols of a shared universality. For Baudrillard, universals now fail to unite singularities (individuals and cultures) in a culture with shared values, other than as global brands and global images celebrated around the world. Remnants of universal theory are now stamped as the tribal tattoos for the global village, where the global logos is replaced by the logos of global brands. With globalization triumphant, and universals seemingly in retreat, all that remains is an “all-powerful global technostructure standing over against the singularities which have gone back to the wild state.”53 Globalization is 55 orbiting and encircling the world within the techno future, while many groups resist or reject this trajectory in seeking a destiny on the tribal grounds of the retro-past. Modernity once aimed for a future among the starry skies of skyscrapers and space ships. With inevitable entropy and fragmentation, should we be surprised to see that many people around the world are digging for cultural roots on the ground and in the past? In other words, the utopian circles of technological globalization are being resisted as dystopian zeros — zeros signaling ends and apocalypses, requiring a retreat into the past. Not only do the zeros suggest ends, they also suggest beginnings. Zero is the first number and thus points toward a new future with possibilities yet to be realized. The year 2000 was always a sign of the future, the space-time coordinates for the world of tomorrow. The three zeros of the new millennium also signal the starting point or the singularity, the moment of nothingness between “positive and negative, yesterday and tomorrow, countdown and blastoff.”54 But, blast off into what kind of tomorrow? This is the task of truly alternative theory. But any such theory can no longer be grounded on church, state, and corporation and call itself alternative. If the zero signals a potential blastoff into a new tomorrow, into the cosmos of the big bang, then upon launching, theory must jettison the baggage of all religions, which are creation myths for premodern yesterdays. Just as the Dark Ages of God and Allah need not be replayed, neither do the reigns of terror of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and many others. The two sides of political modernity, socialism and democracy, embraced industrial bureaucracy and mass society, so it is no surprise that democracy has proven to be little more than a variation of state socialism with a few protections for contracts, property, free speech, and individual rights. Without the Bill of Rights amended to the U.S. Constitution, the culture wars of the left and right would quickly turn America into a police state of the politically correct and spiritually correct — wars against immigration, smoking, drugs, abortion, pornography, corporations, globalization, and so on. If socialism and democracy continue to illustrate the insights of Orwell in 1984, then corporate capitalism echoes the vision of Huxley in Brave New World, where all too real (physical and psychological) human needs are converted into malleable consumer needs satisfied with the 56 proliferation of products, images, and lifestyles — social control via the administration of personal pleasure. Though less deadly than state religion and state socialism, corporate capitalism offers little existential or secular inspiration, other than the fact that marginal competition provides a river of technological innovations and a trickle of cool products. A truly postmodern and postmillennial global civilization may emerge, but it will not be found in the social gods of church and state, nor in the tribalism of ethnic purity and identity politics, nor in the tattoo consumerism and counterfeit individualism celebrated in corporate advertising. As history suggests, very few people will reject all these systems, save for a few independent theorists and innovative artists. Art, science, and theory should no longer support the linear dualities — of left and right, socialism and capitalism, class and race, feminine and masculine, reason and emotion, collective and individual, unity and fragmentation, order and chaos — that caused so much carnage across the twentieth century and continue to yield the same tiresome conclusions that dominate popular culture and academic discourse. Postmillennial theory for postmodern conditions must emerge from the deepest philosophical levels in how humans understand their nature and envision their place on the planet and in the cosmos. Any truly alternative theory must be both secular and humanist in seeking new models of utopia for an emerging global consciousness. 57 nothingness and existence Nothingness haunts being. — Jean-Paul Sartre Across the millennia, the recurrent patterns of circles and zeros — symbolizing being and nothingness for a culture — point toward the existential and evolutionary role of utopian theory in human consciousness, which is always confronting existence with culture based on an idea of the future. Utopia is not only “no place,” it is not there, and this “not there” is the nothingness that makes everything possible for humanity. As Jean-Paul Sartre explained: What being will be must of necessity arise on the basis of what it is not.55 (italics in original.) For humanity to adapt and survive, it is consciousness that confronts existence with culture, and this is only possible by creating what will be, based on what it is not. All evolution is oriented toward future survival, and humanity makes tomorrow become today only by realizing being from nothingness. However imagined, utopia will always be a no place that is not there, yet from nothingness it will shape the cultural being that is there. Sartre is the most famous philosopher of existentialism, which he theorized in numerous plays, novels, essays, and books. In the notoriously complex treatise Being and Nothingness, Sartre sought to ground freedom and responsibility within a framework that respected causality and science, yet was not deterministic (be it behaviorism or Freudianism) regarding human thought and action. Within the existentialist framework, the quest for freedom and authenticity could be theorized, while still acknowledging the deterministic nature of the dominant cultural and technological conditions. The aim of this work is not to resurrect Sartre for the future, or offer another political or economic critique of the 58 dominant cultural conditions of the new millennium (which have been done many times elsewhere). While Sartre’s social views evolved in the subsequent decades after publication of Being and Nothingness, especially with regard to Marxism and the dialectics of political and economic organization, such theories and ideologies are not of concern here because the postmillennial conditions are much deeper than political economy. The contention here is that Sartre’s existential ontology of “being and nothingness” is an accurate account of humanity’s relation to existence and to the future, at least the existential future for humanism and secularism, for living in a universe of chaos, complexity, and the big bang. As such, this ontology can serve as a ground for theorizing the deepest meanings of the zero condition and what these zeros may suggest about the fate of the future and any possible alternative theory. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre viewed human culture as mediating between two realms — existence (being) and consciousness (nothingness). The distinction between existence and consciousness was not a naïve form of dualism or Cartesianism. Sartre recognized the difference between the world and human subjects aware of that world, yet realized that consciousness was in the world and not situated in a separate realm. This meant that existence included everything, the entirety of the universe, including consciousness capable of apprehending and experiencing that existence, that universe which remains utterly indifferent to the fate of humanity.56 Sartre theorized existence as “being-in-itself” and consciousness as “being-for-itself,” and the differences have important implications for how we relate and adapt to the surrounding universe. Being-in-itself is what it is, always full and complete, the empirical realm apart from human consciousness. In contrast, being-for-itself is always in a state of lack, always seeking to make itself complete, always striving toward being-in-itself in the endless quest for fullness that motivates action and evolution. Possessing consciousness, humans are being-for-itself and are always striving to overcome a lack or an incompleteness by filling it with being. In other words, without some kind of lack, there is no reason for being to act for itself, to evolve, to think, to engage in any action directed toward survival in the future. To lack or be incomplete is to not have something (of being), or to have a nothing that needs to be filled with something 59 (of being). As Sartre explicated at great length in Being and Nothingness, nothingness exists and we strive to improve or complete ourselves by filling nothingness with being.57 Perhaps the zeros signal a radical existential condition, a void in consciousness or a cultural nothingness, ready to be filled with a new form of cultural theory and being. This existential and empirical nothingness is not the only kind of nothingness. Consciousness is also a nothingness, but this statement is not meant as a denigration of the human mind or a supernatural claim. Nothingness is an existential condition facing all humans, from which emerge our subjective desire and individual freedom. Sartre famously declared that there was “no exit” from these conditions, that we are condemned to be free, to make of the world what we choose, individually and collectively.58 Nothingness exists, in both existence and consciousness, and this nothingness is the discontinuity in a deterministic universe, the starting point for all human evolution and cultural possibility. Perhaps this is why the zeros also represent a singularity, a discontinuity, an existential moment signaling the possibilities of cultural transformation. Our subjective experience is centered in our own consciousness, which naturally evolved with an orientation aimed toward the empirical world available to the senses. Through consciousness we experience existence, with consciousness existing “behind” our perceptions and experiences of the world.59 For human consciousness to be aware of an object, consciousness must not be that object, much like seeing is separate from what is seen. Since all things are potential objects of consciousness, consciousness must be a non-thing, or a nothingness.60 Consciousness has no deterministic prior cause, other than its situation in human existence and the evolution of the brain, and it is within each individual brain that each consciousness emerges as its own cause. More than a mere “blank slate” or passive receptor of the world, consciousness, Sartre believed, was an active process, individually and collectively, perceiving the world and imposing itself on the world to shape the world, in the realm of thought and in the creation of culture. One way to grasp the nothingnesses of existence and consciousness is to envision a flashlight beam scanning a dark room. The beam of light is consciousness. (Strictly speaking, for Sartre there is no flashlight, only the beam of light.) As the 60 light scans the room, it illuminates existence, as being-initself, completely full. At the same time, because it is ‘beingfor-itself,’ consciousness illuminates existence not only as it is, but as it could be, revealing nothingnesses to be filled. Such nothingnesses are grounded in existence but exist only because of consciousness and the power to imagine what is not there. Here, the zero conditions are nothingnesses, voids of possibility, waiting for visions of what could be based on what is not there. Sartre metaphorically summarized the relation between being and nothingness in several ways, but three will suffice here: 1) “Nothingness exists only on the surface of being”; 2) “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being — like a worm”; 3) “Nothingness haunts being.”61 Perhaps the first two can be combined in a different metaphor, the coiled surfaces of the Möbius strip — “a continuous single-sided surface formed by rotating one end of a strip through 180 degrees and joining it to the other end.”62 Consciousness beams its light upon the contours and surfaces of existence, to gaze upon the world as it is, full and complete. Yet, simultaneously and instinctively, consciousness can also see the flip side of existence, the beam of light revealing nothingness in the world of being. In its evolutionary and existential incompleteness, human consciousness realizes the need to adapt existence to itself, something made possible by probing deeper into the world. Thus, while we can glide across the surfaces of the world, there is also a desire to probe deeper, to penetrate the surfaces of the world to model and remake the world, the evolutionary drive that gave birth to philosophy and science. For human consciousness, existence will always be double-sided, the world as it is and as it could be, a Mobius existence of being and nothingness. Just as zero is a real number, nothingness is a real thing, and the zeros suggest a real condition. It is the double-sided spectre of nothingness that haunts being and consciousness.63 The idea of nothingness amidst the cosmos drives humanity to not only create culture, but to fill it completely with being, to create a total culture to confront nothingness. It is the nothingness that most humans fear, the dreaded voids in thought and theory that drive peoples to imagine deities and utopias. As cultural totalities, models of utopia permit us to imagine ourselves outside the world, able to compare a new world with the existing world, a world of being that would better fill the nothingnesses of existence. 61 On the other hand, the spectre of nothingness is also felt as the potential apocalypse, the idea that the human world may disappear, like Plato’s Atlantis or any of many other apocalypses or end-of-the-world scenarios imagined in world cultures. It is the all-too-human condition of confronting nothingness amidst existence that drives humanity to imagine and pursue utopian models of total culture — the zero becoming a circle. Or to fear total collapse — the circle becoming a zero. 62 nothingness and tomorrow For we mean that man first exists, that is, man first of all is the being who hurls himself toward a future and who is conscious of imagining himself as being in the future. — Jean-Paul Sartre Humanity is always driven to fill a nothingness with being, and for Sartre this “desire of being is always realized as the desire of a mode of being.”64 Humans are always negotiating these existential conditions — existence and consciousness, being and nothingness — through desires and actions based on visions of the future. In this sense, the future is a mode of being, a mode of existence, a nothingness in which we model the possible tomorrows. At any moment of the present, humans are astride a nothingness, a discontinuity between past and future, yesterday and tomorrow. Through desire and freedom, we can transform empirical conditions into existential possibilities and thus transcend the present into the future. For instance, my bringing this book into existence is predicated on the fact of it having nonexistence, a nothingness that I hope to fill with the being of new theory, currently not there. The design of my Apple laptop was predicated on it first having nonexistence, until it was conceived and produced by technologists to fill what is not there. The laptop is currently lying on a desk made of a glass sheet laying across a wood trestle, designed and built by my father and me, yet the architecture and existence of the desk is predicated on it first having nonexistence, a nothingness, not there. Collectively and individually, our future existence is always seduced by how we imagine what is not there, the nothingness we hope to fill via thought or action. On a system-wide scale, humans do not merely imagine books, laptops, and desks, but rather we think in terms of libraries, universities, and the Internet. On a culture-wide scale, humans think much larger — in utopian terms — of libraries creating more literate cities, universities creating more enlightened nations, and the Internet creating more communication in the global village, all of which are 63 predicated upon first having nonexistence, of being not there. From nothingness, we create the cultures of the world. From the zero, we fill the circle. Or so we hope. Humans rarely experience existence in the pure or untouched state of nature, spending their entire lives in some form of technology of culture, from premodern to modern to postmodern. Through science and technology, we long ago embarked on a quest to fill the nothingnesses of existence by adapting the natural world to us in creating an entirely new world, the world of the future. From plow to printing press, factory to electricity, car to computer, there is hardly any aspect of human existence that is not reordered through technology and culture. Because of the conditions of being and nothingness, there is always tension between tradition and technology, one rooted in the past, the other reaching into the future. The modern world was built with eyes looking toward the future, seeking “the world of tomorrow” in a technological mode of existence — industrial and information technologies made possible the mechanized metropolises of skyscrapers, highways, suburbs, malls, cars, airplanes, televisions, computers, Internet, and so on. Immersed in modern and postmodern culture, each of us confronts a deterministic landscape of actuality along with a discontinuous ensemble of future possibilities, the voids and nothingnesses that gives birth to freedom and desire. For Sartre, there is no exit from these conditions, yet in this fate resides the dizzying “vertigo” of all human possibility as we hurl ourselves toward the future.65 We move beyond ourselves in the future, always planning, and projecting ourselves into the plan, oriented toward our possibilities.66 Sartre’s theory should not be associated with naïve futurism that often accompanied scientific and technological utopias in the twentieth century and that now emanate from Silicon Valley to shape the global villages and network societies. Rather, Sartre was acknowledging the existential conditions confronted by humanity in adapting to the universe. Within this universe, life is not guaranteed. To survive into the future, any future, all species must evolve, either by adapting to existence or adapting existence to the species. At the purely biological level, all species survive by adaptation through genetic evolution. This is no less true for the human species emerging over the eons by adapting to existence, with genes ceaselessly replicating and mutating. However, 64 human evolution is not merely biological; it is also cultural. Humanity also survives and evolves by adapting existence to itself, and this has been done through the creation of culture in all its forms over human history. At the center of creating culture is human consciousness, which seeks more than mere survival. It also hopes to flourish. The very nature of evolution and human consciousness demands that humans imagine a future and adapt existence to that future by filling nothingness with being. Sartre posited a unique theory of “time,” specifically the past, present, and future. What has happened before now is the past, the sum of all human choices and actions, a world being-in-itself.67 Now is the present, that moment where the future disappears into the past. The present exists in contrast to past and future, yet is forever on a “perpetual flight” toward the future. The present is being-for-itself.68 What comes after now is the future, the destiny of the present, the beginning of the past. This means the present is forever astride two trajectories, one retreating immediately into the past and one on a never-ending flight toward the future. Since the future has always not happened, just yet, it is a temporal void, a nothingness of possibilities facing and shaping humanity. To illustrate the importance of the future, Sartre described a tennis match in which each player’s movements — serves, backhands, forehands, etc. — on the court are in response to a past state (the opponent’s shots) but are also shaped by a desired future state, a future strategized as a match won. Any example of individual or team sports would illustrate this condition because all the game plans and actual plays can only have meaning in relation to a desired future state of being, a future in which there is victory or defeat, which immediately becomes the past. The plays of the immediate present fill the nothingness of the future to become the past.69 In effect, the future reverses causality, for the future comes after the now, but it causes and shapes the now. In existential terms, the future functions as a mode of being, a mode of existence — within finite existence, the nothingnesses of consciousness and the future present infinite possibilities for modeling tomorrow, for modifying or remodeling existence.70 The nothingnesses in existence, consciousness, and the future combine to provide the “big bang” for humanity and culture, making possible an 65 expanding universe of possible tomorrows, while giving rise to the vertigo of utopian possibilities through which humans hope to move from no place to some place, not there to there, zero to circle. 66 trajectories toward past and future We have to be in these two orders of reality: we have to confront what we’ve lost and anticipate what’s ahead of us: that’s our brand of fatality. — Jean Baudrillard The existential conditions of being and nothingness, past and future, are the foundations for the dualities and destinies that dominate utopian theory — utopia or apocalypse (space), past or future (time). Utopian and dystopian theory is always about reordering the space-time parameters of the present, based on the cumulative events of the past and possibilities existing in the future. Astride the trajectories toward past and future, the duality of utopia and apocalypse steers utopian theory in either of two directions — humanity is either retreating toward the past (the fullness of having already happened) or marching into the future (the nothingness of possibility). Functioning as the broadest metanarratives for human culture, the trajectories of utopia are always toward the vanishing points of space and both directions of time, toward the past or the future. These trajectories span the millennia, with roots reaching back to Plato’s mythical Atlantis, the first utopia to disappear in an apocalypse and the first science fiction utopia to project a future of living in harmony with nature by controlling nature.71 The influence of Atlantis is reflected in the circle as a symbol of the utopian model and in the various utopias destined for the past or future, where humanity, nature, and technology existed in cosmic harmony. Emerging from Atlantis, the trajectories of utopia become clear — oriented toward the past and the future. These trajectories function as metanarratives for human culture. Since it disappeared, Atlantis has become the genetic origin for an endless variety of nostalgic utopian models, all resurrecting the past in returning to yesterday.72 Since it embraced technology, Atlantis was also the genetic origin for an unlimited succession of rationalized utopian models, all remaking the future by accelerating into tomorrow. 67 THE PAST yesterday the lost world return to nature garden paradise promised land small towns local village golden age Gaia hypothesis THE FUTURE tomorrow the new world march of science technological paradise land of progress metropolis global village information, space, atomic ages network society Atlantis has inspired models of utopian cities or nations, aiming to resurrect the past or remake the future, where each model was perfected through a synthesis of nature and culture, all ordered in a dazzling display of art and technology. Advocates of either utopian destiny (past or future) believe that once their model is in place, humanity will live more peacefully and harmoniously in the future. Advocates of past utopias view the cultural or natural world as degenerating toward doom and destruction, and thus promise to preserve a more perfect yesterday. Lost worlds are the premodern and antimodern utopias ultimately sought by all theisms, the cosmic destiny in the myths of deities. Advocates of futurist utopias also view the cultural world as entropic or chaotic but believe it can be technologically ordered for a better tomorrow, while often viewing the premodern and antimodern utopias as simplistic and sentimental, antiquated and outdated. For the futurist utopias, science and technology can expand enlightenment and improve the human condition. These are the modern and postmodern utopias, the optimistic destinies of atheism and secular humanism. The utopias of past and future both fear the great fall, the apocalyptic demise, where degeneration eventually leads to destruction, and this is no less true entering the millennium. Utopia does not mean a society of impossible perfection tainted by a flawed humanity. In reality, utopias have long served as grand narratives for humanity, spanning the millennia in providing models for a better world — from premodern to modern to postmodern, local village to metropolis to global village. Around the world, utopian models have guided the trajectories and destinies of humanity, while shaping the forms and functions of society. The existential assumption 68 of any utopian model is that if the material world can be improved around humans, then life could be improved for humans, life in its actuality and spirituality. Most cultural critics naïvely assume that the futurist utopias have failed to deliver on their promises, apparently oblivious to the technological paradise that has been constructed in the past century. Yet, humans continue to believe in superstitions, actively practice ignorance, herd together in territorial tribes, and wage war against the other in the name of mythical deities and cosmic destinies. Here is the real question: have the futurist utopias failed humanity or has humanity failed the future? 69 chaos theory and zero conditions It could even, no doubt, be said that when destiny is absent do things begin to proliferate in all directions, only when there is no fateful resolution do the random equations of Chaos proliferate. — Jean Baudrillard In The Moment of Complexity, Mark Taylor offered a largely optimistic view of the future, concluding that the emergence of chaos theory and the Internet signaled a major intellectual and technological transformation — from the modern “grid” culture to the postmodern “network” culture. According to Taylor, we are living in an era of ever increasing complexity, where we face cultural drift amidst information overload and an accelerating flux of scientific discovery and technological change. Stability and equilibrium are but “momentary eddies” in the turbulent flux called life, where the grid culture (machines) is being eroded by the network culture (media).73 Taylor viewed contemporary culture as being a moment of complexity, a point of singularity between industrial society and information society, with the “tipping point” signaled by the collapse of the Berlin Wall. For Taylor, the icon of the grid culture is the Seagram Building, while the perfect metaphor for the network culture is the warping architecture of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Taylor is correct that it is no coincidence that network culture and chaos theory emerged at the same time. Because of Moore’s Law (roughly speaking, computer power doubles every two years, while prices per bit decline) for digital media, the networked culture will amplify the complexity of society and accelerate the exponentially increasing quantities of information around the world, creating effects that will be called chaotic and fragmenting — effects and patterns that some will cheerfully embrace and most others will violently resist. Media technologies are never neutral in shaping science or society. As media technologies increase in power, they change our view of the universe and our place in it. Galileo’s telescope ended the geocentric view of the solar 70 system and helped usher in modern science, while Hubble’s telescope and photographic plates combined to reveal the big bang, which has been verified by the electronic media of computers and radio telescopes. Now, the Hubble telescope (a television camera in space) has revealed a universe of previously unimaginable scale. Marshall McLuhan detailed how the printing press helped create the mechanized and mass produced modern world born of the “Gutenberg galaxy,” while electronic media and television have collapsed space and time for communication in effecting the “global village.”74 Through the power of computers and digitalization, the printing press and television are converging within cyberspace and the Internet and the effects are likely to be globally disruptive.75 So it is important to understand the “chaotic” structure of the Internet by integrating media theory into the broader models of complexity and chaos theory. It is possible that only computers and chaos theory can provide a model of the universe for a secular and humane global consciousness, a global civilization without standardization and domination, the Gaia hypothesis without a Luddite world, and the big bangs of matter and media without myth and superstitions. During the past fifty years, the study of chaos has spread to many scientific and cultural fields, mainly because of the exponential growth of computing power necessary to process and pictorially model the complex results. The term “chaos theory” is meant here in a broad sense, encompassing the study of complexity, emergence, self-organization, and the related evolutionary and nonlinear sciences.76 Chaos theory presents a dynamic universe of simple and complex systems that obey causal laws, yet these laws produce strange structures featuring asymmetry, irregularity, instability, discontinuity, self-organization, sudden transformation, and radical change. While chaos does not imply any breakdown in the causal laws of physics, it does require us to rethink how we “look” at the patterns and structures in the surrounding world.77 For chaos theorists, the world is composed of nonlinear systems, where structure forms in “far from equilibrium” states bordering on the edge between order and chaos. Nonlinearity seems to be double-sided in that it functions to produce transitions to chaos, or transitions from chaos to structure. Chaos reveals non-Euclidean forms and patterns that appear 71 to defy lawful necessity, yet which are still the product of causality, presenting the seeming paradoxes of stability in turbulence, simplicity in complexity, pattern in randomness, and order in chaos. The conjoining of traditionally antithetical concepts suggests deep paradoxes — irregular regularity, self-organization, constructive destruction, and the edge of order and chaos. Such paradoxes reflect a terminological and stylistic conflict between the old mechanistic worldview and the new emergent worldview. As Katherine Hayles observed: The difference between the two paradigms is expressed by the icons often associated with them. Whereas the Newtonians focused on the clock as an appropriate image for the world, chaos theorists are apt to choose the waterfall. The clock is ordered, predictable, regular, and mechanistically precise; the waterfall is turbulent, unpredictable, irregular, and infinitely varying in form. The change is not in how the world actually is — neither clocks nor waterfalls are anything new — but in how it is seen. The broadest implications of chaotics derive from this change in vision.78 Often no words exist to describe the phenomena being discovered because the new model is being described in terms of the old model. The emergence of chaos theory supports Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientific revolution, wherein “normal” science operates under a dominant paradigm until it faces crisis from conflicting new “facts” and “theories.” Their punctuated growth eventually forces science to undergo evolution and revolution, fueled by the success of the new theories in satisfying both empirical and aesthetic criteria. Eventually, after the revolution, science then begins a phase of normalcy and problem solving within the newly accepted paradigm.79 This does not suggest relativism of truth as much as it points toward the evolution of knowledge. • that we are not gods does not mean we are fools Complexity and chaos theory challenge the conventional ways we understand the nature of knowledge and human certainty. In his famed and influential book The Postmodern Condition, Jean-Francois Lyotard summarized this predicament: 72 Postmodern science —by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, “fracta,” catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes — is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. It is producing not the known, but the unknown.80 While Lyotard is right, such radical uncertainty should not be mistaken for utter ignorance. Science and postmodern theory can be embraced without a commitment to naïve empiricism or empty nihilism. By their very nature, humans are not omniscient beings. So our methods of knowing have natural limits, but those natural limits are set only by the laws of evolution and the universe. Much like the asymmetrical open-endedness of an evolving universe itself, human knowledge is asymmetrical and evolving, offering certainty but not omniscience. Some theories prove to be true over time, such as gravity, evolution, and relativity, while others are proven false, such as geocentrism, the flat earth, and the steady-state universe. That theory evolves is its virtue and needs not imply utter relativism.81 From the fact that no one person, or institution, or nation can know everything, it does not follow that there must be a divine creator, a cosmic spirit, a powerful state, or any other supernatural entity. That we are not gods who know everything about the structure and evolution of the universe does not imply that the universe must have been “intelligently designed” by a god, creator, or deity of any kind. Similarly, non-omniscience does not mean we have zero knowledge or zero certainty. Knowledge should be thought of as contextual and evolutionary, not timeless or static, always open-ended and subject to revision when presented with new facts, new conditions, new theories. If “knowledge” and certainty mean the total and complete grasp of an unchanging order for the entire universe, then we are left with the false alternatives of being either omniscient gods or ignorant fools. If “certainty” means omniscience, then we must certainly be forever blind. From the fact that we cannot know everything, it does not 73 follow that we cannot understand anything — that we are not gods does not mean we are fools. • zero conditions: singularities at the edge of chaos? Perhaps the zero condition signals blastoff for a new utopian model or countdown for a collapse into an old system of total order. Across the millennia, utopia is associated with a model of the world. Utopian theory almost always embraces models of being and order, while dystopia is usually associated with nothingness and chaos. It’s the fear of uncertainty and chaos, the fear of going from being to nothingness that causes artists, scientists, and philosophers to imagine utopia as a total being, a total order, a final state. The totalizing mode of knowledge has been implicit in almost all utopian models, which seek to fill the nothingness of the future with a total plan that promises total being — a total mode of existence — for culture and humanity. The total plan of utopia is an effort to realize “being in itself” in the future, and this total mode of existence is equated with timelessness, stability, and order. In other words, “being-for-itself” views “being-in-itself” as total order, which requires total control. Yet, chaos theory suggests that such totalizing plans are impossible to realize, precisely because of the inherent chaos in any system of order (or structure or network). One of the basic insights of chaos theory is how lawful systems transition to and from chaos. Two key elements in the transitions are iteration and feedback, both of which generate complex and dynamic systems from simple rules or simple systems. Complex systems require nonlinear equations, which are “solved” through “iteration,” where the output of the equation is recycled through as input. The process of iteration can illustrate whether a system moves toward a stable form, toward a periodic form, or toward a chaotic and seemingly random form.82 It is the random form that is feared in almost all utopian models, precisely because of the fear of uncertainty, of a nothingness not filled, the circle still a zero. In the basin of the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River creates erosion, the outcome of which begets more erosion, for as the walls erode and collapse they break down into more sand, which furthers the erosion power of the river. In Paris, Hong Kong, New York City, or any other metropolis, 74 the collective iteration on the part of all the individuals and organizations makes possible the skyscrapers and the chaotic complexity existing in the cities, creating an overall cultural energy that fuels the pulse of the citizens that create and work in the cities. Iteration can create waves and ruptures that ripple throughout both natural and human systems. Since complex systems have interactive relations among their parts and with the surrounding environment, feedback is transferred though links of interaction, generating synergy throughout the system. Negative feedback moves the system toward stable behavior or the existing forms, whereas positive feedback moves the system toward chaotic behavior or new forms. Negative feedback in a complex system can suddenly create an organizing principle and move the system toward stability. Living systems use negative feedback to manage change and create relative or temporary stability. The human body relies on negative feedback for stabilizing or protecting itself, from body temperature to antibody counts to sensations of pain. Food shortages function as negative feedback to stabilize population growth among animals in nature, thus temporarily stabilizing the ecosystem. For Wall Street, declining stock prices on the global markets is a form of negative feedback that moves the financial system toward an undesirable form of stability. Negative feedback generally operates in maintaining stability or transitioning from chaos to order. For stable systems, negative feedback does not permit the system to reach the point of singularity that would signal the emergence of a new regime, a new form that is the future. Utopian models based in the past embrace negative feedback as a means to preserve the past or effect a return to the past. Negative feedback reinforces the sense of security and stability while also seeming to keep a system closer to “being-in-itself,” the condition of the past, in contrast to the nothingness of the future. Positive feedback in a simple or stable system can create a disorganizing principle or, perhaps, a reorganizing principle and move the system toward chaotic behavior or more complex forms. The transition to a new form is usually marked by a singularity, a point where the positive feedback amplifies to begin the transformation into new forms or regimes. In a simple sense, a singularity is the degree of temperature at which a kernel of corn bursts open to become 75 popcorn, or the degree of temperature at which water freezes to become ice. The Colorado River creates positive feedback by constantly folding in on itself, in the form of turbulence and whirlpools, which are created and exist beyond the edges of singularities. Positive feedback occurs when an enzyme produces a copy of itself in a chemical reaction or when DNA chromosomes make copies of themselves during cell division, processes that are little different than the digitalized representations in cyberspace. The moment of singularity is difficult to predict, an uncertainty suggesting more than one possibility, including the emergence of negative feedback to arrest change and preserve the system. In terms of Sartre, singularities are moments when the infinite becomes finite, and the future takes form (new or old) as it moves into the past. Singularities are key to the process of self-organization, one of the prime ways that dynamic systems transition from chaos to stable structure. For Stuart Kauffman, self-organization is the likely source of life on Earth, with life emerging from the molecular diversity of a prebiotic system of interacting molecules that transitioned beyond a threshold of complexity.83 Life is energy coupled with matter in nonequilibrium systems, where structure is robust and emergent in the crystallization of spontaneous organization. Kauffman suggested that “life” exists near a phase transition, where complex networks and systems are continually structuring on the edge of chaos. Unlike the traditional models of evolution, which see incremental random variation as prevailing over chaos, the principles of chaotic self-organization suggests that life emerges and thrives when bordering “the edge of chaos.”84 In short, self-organization and co-evolution generate structure that natural selection refines so the highest peak of fitness is at the edge of chaos.85 In contrast to Jacques Monod’s poetic claim that “evolution is chance caught on the wing,” Joseph Ford suggested that “evolution is chaos with feedback.”86 The interactions between grains of sand can generate the positive feedback that creates an eventual cascade, where a single grain of sand is the singularity that signals the onset of chaotic transformation. Positive feedback works in the same manner with snow avalanches in mountains. Rain and snow storms both reach points of singularity at which they undergo chaotic transformation to deposit raindrops and snowflakes, which are chaotic structures on small scales. For Wall Street 76 firms, widespread increasing stock prices are a form of positive feedback that can move a system to higher levels of dynamic complexity. Ecosystems rely on systems of positive and negative feedback, which generate the complex forms and structures found in nature, from rain forests to desert landscapes to ocean floors. Most dystopian models of ecological disaster are based upon runaway feedback, where unchecked singularities punctuate the environmental equilibrium and signal the onset of catastrophic chaos.87 Punctuated equilibrium is another feature of chaos and need not always be feared. Rather than suggest only fatal catastrophe, the manner in which systems can rebound from such upheavals suggests a vibrant robust nature. Punctuated equilibrium can also be constructive. The mixture of negative and positive feedback on the stock market is what creates its turbulent and chaotic patterns, which render the system more robust and durable over time. As illustrated by the dotcom collapse in 2000 to 2001, price declines are considered to be corrections of market bubbles. Steep rises in prices suggest a punctuated equilibrium that can also be a natural correction signaling a robust and dynamic market. Some systems never stabilize, are forever in turbulence, like the weather, or the oceans sending wave after wave crashing upon the rocks and sands of the beaches. Turbulence is caused by the accumulation of huge numbers of incommensurable frequencies. Turbulence represents the quasi-periodic motion that never exactly repeats itself and will be forever unpredictable in specificity because of the complex set of variables that influence its behavior.88 We know generally that the waves will periodically crash against the rocks, but the precise timing and forms are unpredictable. The same is true of weather patterns. Complex systems may be extremely sensitive to a certain value or range of values — so sensitive that even small variations may cause the system to move from order to chaotic new forms, possibilities that are feared by those who favor utopias in the past. Any system may have sensitivity to position, or velocity, or environmental factors, and any slight variation over time through iteration or positive feedback may cause the system to begin radical transformation. This is called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.”89 As Edward Lorenz discovered, the weather conditions are extremely 77 sensitive to small perturbations or disturbances. This specific phenomenon is popularly known as “the butterfly effect,” because some scientists believe that the “flap of a butterfly’s wings” may cause a tornado in Texas or a typhoon in Tahiti. While this idea seems rather farfetched, the notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions and small variations is quite real. Key here is the folding and unfolding of feedback, which can suddenly magnify small changes unto huge effects, like the grain of sand that causes an avalanche. The effect seems out of proportion to the cause, yet the system is no less causal. This insight is expressed in the ancient phrase “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” If it had occurred, the Y2K crash would have reflected sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Perhaps the zero condition is like the grain of sand, poised to start the cascade into new social forms. • postmodern fragmentation or period three? Why do so many critics and theorists view postmodern culture as an age of chaos and fragmentation, which must be arrested or reversed by a retreat into a more “stable” system, or more “harmonious” period that existed some time in the past? Perhaps postmodernity and the information age represent the third phase of evolution in the complex system that is human culture. A complex system may transition to chaos through some form of periodic or aperiodic behavior. For example, after a period where the system is “mixing things up,” it may reach a bifurcation point where it moves toward transformation into a radically different structure. Bifurcation is very similar to “period-doubling.” For example, a linear additive system resembles: 2 + 2 = 4, 4 + 2 = 6, 6 + 2 = 8, 8 +2 = 10, etc. A nonlinear period-doubling system resembles: 2 x 2 = 4, 4 x 2 = 8, 8 x 2 = 16, 16 x 2 = 32, etc. However, a nonlinear exponential system resembles: 2 squared = 4, 4 squared = 16, 16 squared = 256, 256 squared = 65,536. After four periods under linear addition, the outcome of the system is 10, whereas under period doubling the outcome of the system is significantly different — 32. However, after four periods under the exponential system, the outcome is radically different — 65,536. Period three is where extreme divergence emerges, or a cascading effect occurs, both resulting in massive turbulence and new structures produced 78 by exponential divergence. Period three implies chaos. Though they embrace different philosophical approaches, Alvin Toffler’s “three waves” of technological transformation and Jean Baudrillard’s “three orders” of representation and simulation both explain the cultural chaos introduced by the information age, which has succeeded the agrarian and industrial eras.90 Toffler’s three waves are the agrarian, industrial, and information technology regimes, with information technology fragmenting the hierarchies and structures of the industrial system as it accelerates across borders and around the planet. For Baudrillard, the first order is founded on the belief that representation can be a copy (mere imitation) or counterfeit, yet that image can help restore the ideal world in God’s image. This was the belief of Renaissance art and theatre. The second order was born of the machine, where energy and production can fulfill the utopias of desire through unlimited serial production of ideal models. This was the aim of modern industrial utopias, where the mechanized metropolis resulted in the massproduced, mall-induced consumer society. The third order is based on information and simulation, where the utopian model becomes an extension of cybernetic control operating upon all aspects of the world.91 The electronic media have so proliferated that they are now no longer merely appendages of modern industrial society, for the media have departed on their own trajectory of reprogramming or reproducing the world, while fragmenting culture and human identity into the virtual and tribal. This is the technological regime of the information age, with computers, cyberspace, the Internet, the clone, the theme park, the electronic screen filled with proliferating data. • why are there so many apocalyptic films? Over the past five decades, numerous novels and films have depicted impending apocalypses, from nuclear war to environmental destruction to technology run amok. In every scenario, human civilization is on the verge of collapse or catastrophe, from which there may be no return. Yet the apocalypse has failed to arrive, always seeming to be lurking on the horizon of possibilities. Perhaps one reason for these visions is intuitive fear of runaway feedback and punctuated 79 equilibrium.92 In essence, there exist three sizes or rates of phase transitions — subtle, explosive, and catastrophic. Each can be destructive or constructive, or express a mixture of constructive destruction. Subtle chaos is like the slow irregular erosion occurring in the Grand Canyon or the steady irregular growth in a rain forest. Explosive chaos is like an avalanche of snow, or the rapid growth of a firm, such as those periods experienced by Microsoft, Dell Computers, and Google. Catastrophic chaos is like volcanoes and tsunamis, whose massive turbulence can significantly damage all systems in their paths, such as forests or cities. Catastrophic chaos is when technology expands exponentially to permeate and turbulently transform culture, such as with computers and electronic media over the past thirty years. On the other hand, the collapse of dotcoms, Enron, and the NASDAQ — which lost eighty percent of its value — illustrate catastrophic chaos. Runaway feedback that punctuates equilibrium to cause catastrophic chaos is a process that underlies most fears of the future in models of dystopia or apocalypse, be it atomic, ecological, or virtual. Almost all cinematic dystopias or apocalypses assume some form of runaway feedback or punctuated equilibrium, as seen in Metropolis, Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, Weekend, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Soylent Green, Westworld, Mad Max, Koyaanisqatsi, The Terminator, Waterworld, The Matrix, and many others. Runaway feedback is also the assumption of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Paul Virilio’s “knowledge accident,” Bill Joy’s future without humans, and the Unabomber’s manifesto.93 It is runaway feedback and punctuated equilibrium that may cause a utopian system to go from order to chaos, being to nothingness, circle to zero. The dystopian models assume runaway feedback will neutralize any negative feedback, or the models do not account for the possibility of other forms of positive feedback to check the runaway feedback. Ecological problems certainly exist, yet the level of potential for global catastrophe remains scientifically controversial and cannot be resolved here. However, the Gaia hypothesis and other global ecology models can be problematic in two ways. First, the intricate and dense networks of ecosystems, which could fuel runaway feedback, are far too complex to be managed as a total singular system, as indicated by the inability of scientist-citizens 80 inside the Biosphere (Arizona) to totally manage even a tiny ecosystem. This example suggests that total global ecological planning is impossible and would lead to more and more draconian controls to address each new unexpected crisis, creating a drive toward total negative feedback or a stable attractor that could only be disastrous for nature and humans. Second, punctuated equilibrium and runaway positive feedback can also be constructive, or part of the process of constructive destruction that can occur in chaotic complex systems, as witnessed in the vibrant rebirth around Mount St. Helens. While ecological modeling must take into account the complex web of relations in ecosystems, it must also realize that such complexity cannot be totally or centrally controlled. Rather than merely propose models of control through negative feedback, perhaps ecological models could be developed that embrace other forms of positive feedback to constructively counter the environmental problems. Through science and technology, the modern utopia sought to create a new cultural system, where singularities and positive feedback would amplify and accelerate change, thus transitioning the present into the future, the old world into “the world of tomorrow.” On the other hand, once modernity became the dominant system, it too began to resist additional positive feedback or suppress singularities, either of which might challenge the system. In one sense, the attacks on the Twin Towers were like forms of negative feedback, part of an unstable system of globally interlinked cultures, where the singularity signals a utopian reversal in a return to a premodern past. In another sense, the attacks were forms of positive feedback, creating a global singularity that could have generated new and alternative forms of theory, which could challenge both the modern and premodern models of utopia. Philosophically, the singularity is always related to nothingness, for the singularity is what makes possible any radical transformation of being, transcending the present into the future, thus remaking the now. Singularities emerge from the discontinuities in the system, the nothingness of future possibilities. In nature, the singularity and nothingness make possible a nonlinear system of emergent order or structure. In culture, the singularity and nothingness are where the future and freedom converge to create transformation in an openended set of cultural systems. 81 • zero conditions: stable, dynamic, or chaotic attractors? The term attractor has long been part of scientific depiction, referring to the point or points toward which a system converges to yield formal structure. An attractor basin is the locus of points leading to an attractor. Modeling these attraction points permits a qualitative evaluation of a system. As John Briggs phrased it, attractors allow for “abstract portraits” of system behavior.94 All models of utopia are portraits of social system behavior and have sets of attractors and attractor basins. Before chaos theory, traditional science had identified two general types of attractors— stable (or static) and systemic or dynamic.95 The Greeks believed that “rest” was the natural state of motion on Earth, because everything moved toward Earth and eventually came to “rest.” The stable attractor would be the point at the center of the Earth toward which gravity pulled all motion. Similarly, a marble rolling inside a bowl will eventually settle at the bottom of the bowl. The point at the bottom is the stable or static attractor for the system that describes the motion of the marble in the bowl. Stability and simplicity are often associated with each other as utopian forms believed to preserve unity and totality. Almost all premodern, antimodern, fundamentalist, or conservative utopian models converge upon the attractor basins of stability and simplicity, principles that are believed to order the total mode of existence in the past — be it the lost world, return to nature, garden paradise, the promised land, small towns, local village, golden age, traditional values, the simple life, the good old days, and so on. It seems that too many ecological utopias naïvely embrace the stable attractor, as do Luddites and the Unabomber. Perhaps the zero condition signals the emergence of a stable attractor, the absence of any truly new utopian models for living the future. If the utopian stable attractor looks to the past, then the utopian dynamic attractor looks toward the future. A dynamic attractor represents the set of points that describe the form toward which systems move with periodic behavior influenced by negative feedback. Dynamic attractors would be the elliptical circles in which the planets move, influenced 82 by the force of their motion and the negative feedback between the Sun’s gravitational pull and their mass in motion, the force that creates the “orderly” motion and prevents the planets from careening off into space.96 In Newtonian science, dynamic attractors express equilibrium trajectories upon which the motion of systems converges and is ordered. Far too often the fascination with the dynamics of the system leads to totalizing utopian models, where, it is believed, the social system can ordered as a totality, a mechanized and synchronized totality, usually through centralized and bureaucratic control. Corporations and bureaucracies are often organized or managed from above as a totalized system, one of the central reasons why communist utopias became totalitarian. The utopian idea of the clockwork cosmos is a dynamic attractor, as are mechanization, standardization, assembly lines, interstate highways, and corporate flow charts. The modern utopia embraced the idea of dynamic attractors, ordering principles for the mode of existence in the future — the new world, the march of science, technological paradise, land of progress, metropolis, the space age, information age, and so on. The futurist dynamic attractors were perfectly expressed in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), H. G. Wells’ Things to Come (1936), and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair (named The World of Tomorrow). Chaos theory has uncovered a new attractor in nature, called a fractal or strange attractor, in which the patterns of change are highly complex, sometimes bordering on the infinitely complex, with forms that are asymmetric and highly irregular. Chaos pioneer Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” from computer models of equations expressing various natural systems.97 Fractals are the geometrical representations of the attractors for nonlinear or nonequilibrium systems, the spatial or temporal forms toward which chaotic system trajectories attract or converge. When the behavior of such systems are plotted, the border between order and chaos often takes on fractal forms, characterized by irregularity, roughness, texture, and self-similarity. Selfsimilarity refers to patterns of regularity and similarity across different scales of structure or at different levels of magnification, thus resulting in the seeming paradoxes of “regular irregularity” or “irregular regularity.” The borders usually enclose finite areas, yet have infinite length, which give fractals an eerie beauty in different dimensions and at 83 different scales, while offering complete structure in any scale of observation or magnification.98 Fractals are similar to holograms or DNA in that each fractal point or curve can contain information that could model the entire system. Strange attractors can also be the product of systems with sensitive dependence on initial conditions where there exists for every point on the trajectory a nearby point of sudden and exponential divergence.99 Fractal geometry appears to be challenging the Euclidean geometry that has reigned for over two millennia, so perhaps the edges of chaos will challenge the smooth circles of utopia. Fractals are found across the systems of the universe from cells, to forests, to mountains, to seashores, to skylines, to social systems, to galactic structures.100 Fractal patterns are when smaller parts of the universe resemble larger parts of the universe, and those larger parts may resemble even larger parts. DNA strands are spiral as are seashells and spiral galaxies like the Milky Way. Moss on a rock in a stream within a forest may contain growth patterns and forms that express fractal self-similarity with the surrounding forest. A coastline is self-similar at different scales of observation, from a satellite view down to a few grains of sand. The view from space may suggest a holism, but once we start moving down in scale, we find that the complexity of the coastline approaches infinity. As a totality, the skyline of the skyscraper city often takes on a fractal form. Fractal scaling has long been used in depicting the human form, from Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to Marcel Duchamps’ Nude Descending a Staircase no. 2 to Le Corbusier’s “Modulor Man.” Fractals are found throughout the human body, from the circulatory system, to the lungs, to the muscle network, to the small intestine, to the folding patterns on the surface of the brain. The veins in the human circulatory system are fractal and self-similar at different scales and magnification. The human heartbeat has fractal rhythms, for when electrocardiograms (ECG) are graphed in phase space they reveal strange attractors. Even brain activity has fractal patterns, for when electroencephalograms (EEG) are graphed they too reveal strange attractors, which will be different depending on whether a person is daydreaming, watching their favorite utopian film, or writing a book about utopia. It seems that the brain maintains a low level of chaos, but then self-organizes into a simpler state when 84 presented with familiar stimuli and moves to a more dynamic and chaotic state when experiencing unfamiliar or mentally challenging stimuli.101 Fifty years after Jackson Pollock’s frenzied drips and splatters created chaos on the canvas, scientists and art historians have combined to discover fractal scaling in Pollock’s canvases, perhaps illustrating why, given all the artistic imitators, many of his canvases remain strangely attractive at least to some art aficionados.102 It remains to be seen if the zero condition is a strange attractor for global society or merely for a few eclectic theorists and artists. • the fall of the berlin wall The implosion of the Soviet Union first became visible, at least to the West, at the Berlin Wall in 1989. The first “hole” in the wall was the singularity signaling catastrophic chaos. Completed in 1961, the Berlin Wall was an attempt to generate negative feedback, to arrest the singularities and prevent any possibility of phase transitions toward catastrophic chaos, the transformation of the communist system. While the Wall could keep most citizens in, it could not keep ideas out, especially those flowing around the planet in the electronic curvature of the global media networks. Forced to adapt to the emergence and spread of media technologies, Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring through information technology) and glasnost (openness) signaled the beginning of the catastrophic phase transition. The permission of some openness for a few technological singularities was enough to begin a massive transition that brought down the old order. As the dynamic attractor faced more singularities posed by media technologies, the attractor became more convergent and rigid. The more the system became rigid, the more it approached the equilibrium and paralysis of pure order. As the system approached pure order in the epicenter, thus creating political paralysis in the Kremlin, it reciprocally moved toward a catastrophic transition at the system’s energetic and chaotic edges, thus creating political turbulence in Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, the set of attractors could no longer contain all singularities attracting toward any available openness, and the massive phase transition began as hundreds of thousands swarmed over and through the wall. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers, there was a gaping singularity, a discontinuity, 85 and it seems like no new utopian theory has emerged, other than the reruns of antimodern superstition and premodern tribalism. After all, America seems bent upon building a wall across the beautiful desert of the southwest, apparently oblivious to how its own foreign policies (drug wars, farm subsidies, support for repressive regimes, etc.) create the conditions that are used to justify the wall — a wall that is an assault on humanity and a crime against nature. Intellectuals of the left are now reviving Marxism for postmillennial culture, as if the inquisitions and mass murders committed under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao had nothing to do with the totalizing model of the world that centralized so much state power in the pursuit of total equality for the mass man, total synchronization for mass society, total unification for the mass mind. Of course, the right is trumpeting its theisms, the myths it now views as eternally triumphant in the wake of the collapse of communism, with fundamentalism (of all religions) functioning to restore theistic imperialism as it evangelically spreads ignorance and anti-enlightenment around the world. • smashing symmetry It is easy to offer paeans to equality and unity, yet everyone seems to ignore or overlook the flip sides to unity and equality, which are uniformity and symmetry. Intellectual diversity can never be maintained in an ideological system that converges toward unity of thought. Such ideological systems begin with a Truth believed universal and timeless from which are deduced the particular truths of a complex world. In the drive to unify thought under a Truth, there exists the inherent drive to simplify, to confront the complexity of the world by seizing upon particular truths, and then imposing them upon the world in the name of the universal Truth. Conformity to a narrow or singular standard becomes the method to achieve intellectual unity and equality, where groupthink prevails over thoughtcrime, the thoughts and theories that cannot be unified under the received Truth. The more any society or organization converges toward total unity and equality, the more there will be expansions of uniformity and symmetry in all directions, along all lines, and the circle becomes the cube, ordered under the mind of the square, the grid, the mass man, the faithful, the true believer, the tenure 86 committee, the bureaucratic brain that dominates social hierarchies and collectives, from government to corporate to academic to church. Symmetry is the aesthetic and existential ground of the square and the cube. Symmetry is the most simple form of order, yet it means more than mere proportion and beauty. Symmetry is the pattern that distinguishes itself by being regular or identical in at least two respects, and this pattern is then replicated to offer visual or cognitive order amidst the asymmetrical or irregular world, which is usually alleged to be “chaos.” Symmetry is a subtle mask of uniformity, the world of repetition and interchangeability of parts (as in a symmetrical math equation). Social symmetry is embedded in the idea that two parties represent democratic processes, or that two sides (left and right) represent debate and dissent on all issues. Such symmetry is neither democratic nor liberating and merely protects two sides of monolithic social order, symbolized by the cube, the box of conformity. Architectural symmetry was always the sign of social order, the utopian dream of ordering chaos through rigidity and uniformity. Intellectual symmetry is the sign and symbol of the specialist, the singular vision, where narrow standards substitute as high standards, the mental aesthetic of the cube, with a box for everything and everything in a box, otherwise “chaos” reigns. Symmetry and unity are always deployed to counter complexity and diversity, to prevent the singularities that might arise from nothingness to create new forms of being. If there is a single building or architectural style that has smashed symmetry, then perhaps it is Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Having once been a thriving mercantile and industrial community, Bilbao was facing difficulty in the transition to a postindustrial economy. The architecture of the city mirrored these changes, with a cityscape dominated by many low buildings of the premodern era, punctuated by a few linear structures and skyscrapers born of modern utopia. The Basque Administration and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation became partners in building a new Guggenheim Museum and placing it at the heart of the utopian revitalization of Bilbao, hoping the museum would exceed the spiral greatness of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim in New York City. Gehry recommended the museum be built at a bend in the Nervion River, to emerge amidst a decaying industrial wasteland and 87 at the edge of the urban grid that emanated from the classical boulevard, the Gran via Diego Lopez de Haro. Sitting next to the river and emerging from the industrial wasteland is a shimmering titanium structure, an undulating flux with multiple curvilinear sections of many sizes and dimensions. Gehry integrated the historical and industrial context through a combination of Spanish limestone, industrial glass, and postmodern titanium. At one-third millimeter thick, the titanium surface is pillowy; thus the titanium sheets do not lie perfectly flat and a strong wind can make the surface of the museum appear to ripple or flutter. The visual effect is striking, suggesting an organic nature to the exterior texture. In a futurist sense, the Guggenheim was a clear move beyond the linear finality of most modernist architecture, suggesting an embrace of the postmodern future that is emerging around us in such a fragmented way. From a cubist perspective, the turbulent forms of the museum suggests the capture of motion from multiple perspectives. From a modernist perspective, the turbulent forms resemble a pile of curvilinear steel boxes haphazardly tossed on the ground next to a river. In an evolutionary sense, the forms suggest that mutant bacterial crystals are emerging from the sludge of toxic waste. In an organic sense, the forms resemble a complex flower, its petals unfolding upward in chaotic patterns, while simultaneously falling away toward the Earth from which it emerged. In a relativist sense, the forms express the warps and curves of Einstein’s space-time. Extending from beneath the long prow-like form is a much longer section that wraps underneath a bridge, only to evolve into a warped, asymmetrical tower on the other side. Whether as blocks or crystals or petals, the forms exhibit the paradox of irregular regularity, or self-similarity, at different scales and from different perspectives. The effect is complex, at once chaotic and turbulent, yet flowing and organic. Within this external turbulence, the interior atrium explodes upward from the river level, containing twisted limestone obelisks, curvilinear walls of glass, warped stair towers, and slanting plaster walls. In effect, the Guggenheim is a vortex for experiencing art. If Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon paralleled Einstein’s relativity revolution in space-time, then perhaps Gehry’s Guggenheim has paralleled the chaos revolution in science and culture.103 However, it remains highly uncertain 88 as to whether it is an icon for the emergence of a new kind of culture, at once evolutionary and emergent, organic and open-ended, secular and tolerant, scientific and creative, diverse and individualized. If the Guggenheim style merely becomes a brand image that is cloned and copied around the world, with little modification of global cultural theory, then its revolutionary artistic and cultural potential will have been neutralized. • flat earth, clockwork cosmos, gaia hypothesis, the big bang In the aesthetics of chaos, there is a way to understand the colliding utopian attractors and utopian models — premodern/antimodern, modern, and postmodern. In nature and culture, the premodern, antimodern, fundamentalist utopias are always imagined to be moving toward stable attractors — simplicity, symmetry, unity, regularity, slowness. The premodern utopias embrace the stable attractors of the past, the world of imagined stability and certainty, where things should never change or evolve, an imagined world of being-in-itself, manifest in visions of promised lands, golden ages, local villages, tribal villages, small towns, and so on. While stability plays a role in nature and culture, to conclude that stability is a final state for nature or culture is the equivalent of creationism or a flat earth. The anti-evolution theories of creationism and intelligent design are a veiled attempt to cling to spiritual stability, a stable attractor for the minds of myth closed to any form of secular or atheistic spirituality. Fundamentalist utopias are a flat earth future. In nature and culture, the modern utopias embraced the dynamic attractors of the clockwork cosmos — expressed in machines, mechanization, speed, highways, grids, symmetry, standardization, synchronization, massification, and bureaucracy. These attractors were central to ordering the new world as a technological paradise, land of progress, industrial metropolis, and so on. Chaos theory challenges these models because it embraces a radically different scientific and aesthetic worldview. The attractors of the premodern and modern utopias are much different than the strange attractors of chaos — asymmetry, irregularity, fragmentation, divergence, 89 turbulence, complexity, and catastrophe. Strange attractors function to fragment destiny and break symmetry, thus transforming simplicity into complexity, stability into instability, regularity into mutation, linearity into discontinuity, unity into multiplicity, and totality into emergence. The strange attractor has no final basin, for its locus is shifting and discontinuous, yet adaptive and unfolding, suggesting a utopia without unity in a universe at the edge. The aesthetics of chaos and the dominant utopian models are difficult to reconcile, for they are rooted in different (deductive versus inductive) cognitive processes, with advocates of premodern and modern models usually seeking to impose simple forms on everything in reality that resembles the complex forms of chaos. Premodern or modern, the cognitive preferences and utopian models both offer a universalism that seeks to be comprehensive, yet remains counterfeit, for they deductively seize upon particular instances of order and then seek to universalize them to the totality of culture and humanity. Throughout the utopian model, the utopian attractors seek to order the mode of existence in the desire to overcome nothingness with a world full of being — being that is static and stable, mechanized and standardized. What seem like oppositional modes of existence actually share a deep symmetry, for they are cognitive efforts to impose order on chaos or at least what is perceived as chaos. It is much easier to order the complex under a template of the simple and standardized, creating a utopian model to which the “chaotic” world must conform. For the great many, the thought of a chaotic and turbulent world is philosophically and cognitively unbearable, so they will continue to embrace visions of total order and banal stability. The premodern and modern models of utopia envision order trumping chaos, where totality and unity prevail over individuality and fragmentation. On a global scale, the Gaia hypothesis is often assumed to be the ultimate stable attractor, yet, properly understood within chaos theory, it is a complex and chaotic system, much different than a simple stable system or the linear clockwork cosmos. If the Gaia hypothesis becomes another totalizing model that tries to order all possible outcomes under a single plan, then it will become like a closed system under a stable or systemic total attractor and will have negative effects on the planet and its people. If Gaia, the Guggenheim, the 90 Internet, or postmodern fragmentation suggest any kind of new utopian model parallel to the emergence of chaos, then it seems the new mode of existence will have to embrace fractals and strange attractors. 91 ground zero for theory The new axis is defined by advanced and retrograde, forward and reverse. — Bruce Mau and Jennifer Leonard Just as there is no exit from the universe, there is no exit from utopia and dystopia, for as long as humans seek to better their lives, some of humanity will seek “the best of all possible worlds” in shaping the destinies for any possible worlds. Humans must always confront being and/or nothingness, past and future, and utopian theory implicitly or explicitly frames the future in terms of utopia (fullness of being) or apocalypse (possible nothingness). The dual assumption is that culture is being created and completed in the given model of a utopia, or it is facing doom and destruction in a dystopian apocalypse; the potential apocalypse was the underlying assumption of the Cold War, the Gaia hypothesis, global warming, the invention of the Internet, and any number of novels and films. This association of apocalypse and utopia was especially true in the twentieth century, where almost all utopian theory had an undercurrent in which an ideal new world was on the brink of being realized, as was imagined for the atomic age and the information age, or the existing world was on the brink of destruction — vaporizing in a flash of atomic light, vanishing beyond the horizons of hyperreality, sinking beneath the waters of the Gaia hypothesis, arrested in the retreat to superstition and spiritual paradises, disappearing within the vast cosmic nothingnesses.104 As nothingness haunts being, apocalypse haunts utopia, where the circle becomes a (ground) zero. In our own mortality, humans have sensed that existence is what it is, that the universe is indifferent to our fate, individually and collectively. This condition is one reason all peoples have imagined mythical deities and destinies by identifying patterns in the cosmos and used them to model culture in the hope of creating meaning and a shared destiny for their lives. Gazing up at the starry skies, the Greeks saw starry spheres with Earth at the center, and the circle became 92 the first utopian form. Gazing through telescopes, Galileo and Newton saw a solar system revolving around the Sun, powered to move in an elliptical circle by the forces of gravity and motion, and thus the “clockwork cosmos” became a model of the dynamic modern utopia moving into the future. Gazing through much more powerful telescopes, Hubble saw an expanding universe, with galaxies moving away in all directions at accelerating speeds. Entering the millennium, we have learned that the cosmos first gazed upon by the ancients is far more vast than they could ever have imagined, and the spaces of nothingness are expanding as they shove two hundred billion galaxies outward in expanding the universe. Thus far, there are no utopian models based on the big bang or chaos theory. The Internet may eventually produce a global brain, but global warming calls for a global consciousness and the big bang requires an expanding mind, for the universe is the ultimate in a chaotic, evolving, and open system, yet forever finite. New utopian theory could emerge to counter the disasters of the past, lest humans repeat them yet again. In the twentieth century, the most totalizing political systems produced the greatest dystopian disasters, so any new utopian theory must discard the ethics of self-sacrifice, the politics of social unity, the dualities of left-right, myths of spiritual paradises, and models of total social order. In the third millennium, any new utopian global consciousness must be based in individuality and autonomy with an eye on totality, not as a final end, not as a grand unity, but as a complex web of ecological, technological, aesthetic, and cultural relations that span the globe, a horizontal network functioning not to naïvely unite peoples as herds in tribes and masses in nations but to connect and enlighten persons as human beings in a borderless world, creating conditions for empowered humans to collectively and/or individually fill their futures with their own chosen tomorrows. For postmillennial utopian theory, the zero conditions can be viewed as voids and vortexes, singularities for the sciences of evolution, chaos, and complexity, where the strange attractors for an enlightened and humanistic civilization can only be found in the cultural syntheses of exchange and anarchism, global and local, feminine and masculine, ecology and technology, art and science, existence and nothingness. It is ground zero for theory. 93 endnotes Paul Hegarty, Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2004): 145. 2 Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergence of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (New York: Rodale Press, 2006): 214. 3 Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 2000); Chet Raymo, Walking Zero: Discovering Cosmic Space and Time Along the PRIME MERIDIAN (New York: Walker and Company, 2006). 4 Paul Virilio, Ground Zero (London: Verso, 2002). In addition to the interest in zero, there was scientific and philosophical interest in nothing and nothingness; Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space (Cambridge, Mass: Perseus, 1998); John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe (New York: Vintage Books, 2000); and K.C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered Over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything (San Diego: Harvest, 2001). 5 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 13. 6 Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002). 7 Among many books: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994); —, The Illusion of the End (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); —, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996). 8 As of this writing, the Dome stands empty. However, there have been any number of ideas for the site, including a theme park, a technology park, housing projects, and a sports and entertainment complex. 9 Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion (New York: Columbia University press, 2000): 34-36. 1 10 The opening lines to 1999 are: “I was dreamin’ when I wrote 94 this / Forgive me if it goes astray / But when I woke up this mornin’ / Coulda sworn it was judgment day / The sky was all purple, there were people runnin’ everywhere / Tryin’ to run from the destruction / You know I didn’t even care / say say two thousand zero zero party over / oops out of time / So tonight I’m gonna party like it’s 1999.” 11 Brad Lemley, “Time Machine,” Discover 28-35 (November 2005); Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 12 Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, 67. 13 Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. The book cover also has an additional subtitle: “The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer.” The most recent prototypes can be viewed at the Web site for The Long Now Foundation (http://www. longnow.com). 14 Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion, 35-36. 15 The fate of art and culture remains uncertain at Ground Zero, for the future of Ground Zero is being shaped by the battle between the forces of culture and the forces of memorialization. New York cultural institutions are abandoning plans to inhabit the future buildings at Ground Zero chiefly because memorializers want there to be no art or cultural theory that might be critical of America or Americans, or any theory of 9/11 that is not about heroes and “attacks on freedom.” At the future of Ground Zero, apparently there will be plenty of heroes but zero new theory as indicated by the 2005 panel discussion organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council — appropriately called “Zero Culture.” 16 Bruce Begout, Zeropolis: The Experience of Las Vegas (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 17 In the wake of September 11, the theories of the left and right are no longer adequate for understanding and confronting the vertiginous conditions and cultural voids of postmillennial culture. These conditions will be the topic of Skyscraper Vertigo, the fourth book in the Theory Zero series. 18 Surrounding Las Vegas, the Nevada desert is filled with striking juxtaposition and cultural contrasts — Anasazi, the Bomb, Burning Man, Area 51, Luxor hotel, Earth Art City, Extraterrestrial Highway, Bonneville salt flats, Yucca Mountain, Clock of the Long Now, 5000-year old trees, and the nothingnesses in the deserts of the real. Nevada Test Sites, the fifth book of the Theory Zero series, will theorize these places as “ground zeros” for imagining any utopia of the future. 19 Godfrey Reggio, “Essence of Life,” Koyaanisqatsi, DVD. Directed by Godfrey Reggio (Los Angeles: MGM Home Entertainment, Inc. 95 2002). 20 Superstring theory was explained for non-scientists by Brian Greene in The Elegant Universe (New York: Vintage, 1999) and The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Vintage, 2004). 21 Greene, The Elegant Universe, 117-131. The aim of the “theory of everything” is to complete the grand unification of physics, to unite the macrocosmic with the microcosmic, so that a single theory can describe the four main forces of the physical universe: the forces of gravity and electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. The difficulty in uniting relativity with quantum mechanics is complex, but central to the problem are the limits of particle physics, which, in effect, reduce everything in the physical universe to finite particles of matter located at points in space and time. While this methodology works well in the everyday world of Newtonian mechanics, the assumptions of point-particle physics break down in the realms of quantum uncertainty and relativistic space-time. 22 Greene, The Elegant Universe, 135-165. 23 Greene, The Elegant Universe, 188-209; The Fabric of the Cosmos, 362-370. 24 Greene, The Elegant Universe, 312; The Fabric of the Cosmos, 488-489. 25 Henning Genz, Nothingness: The Science of Empty Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus 1999): 282-300. Though empty space can approach extreme nothingness, it can never be totally empty because of quantum mechanics and fluctuations of relativity, 307308. Empty space is often within various “fields,” such as those of gravity and electromagnetism; photons also pass through empty space. 26 Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 238-248. 27 Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 240-243, 387-388, 473. 28 Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 479-485. 29 Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, 483. 30 William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1986); —, All Tomorrow’s Parties (New York: Ace Books, 1999). 31 William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984): 51. 32 Gibson, Count Zero, 50. 33 Gibson, Count Zero, 104-105 289-290, 293-294. 34 Barry Vacker, “Cosmic Vertigo on the Isle of Lost,” in Orson Scott Card, ed., Getting Lost: Survival, Baggage, and Starting Over in J. J. Abrams’ Lost (Dallas: Benbella Books, 2006): 91-107. 35 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 22. 36 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 24-36. 96 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 216-217. Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 63-67, 72-73, 76-79, 135, 143, 181, 253, 272-273, 280-281. 39 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 80-112. 40 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 109. 41 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 148-175. 42 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 42-67, 126-128, 176-195. 43 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 196-209. 44 Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 11. 45 Global warming and the Gaia hypothesis will be further theorized in Crashing Into the Vanishing Points, while the overlooked “space age” utopianism of Gore’s book and film will be explored in Starry Skies Moving Away. 46 Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: The New York Public Library, 2000). The exhibit website is http://utopia.nypl.org/Pt1exhibit.html. 47 Krishan Kumar, “Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century,” in Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: The New York Public Library, 2000): 251-267, 264; Lymon Tower Sargent, “Utopia and the Late Twentieth Century: A View from North America,” in Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: The New York Public Library, 2000): 333-345, 343. 48 Laurent Gervereau, “Symbolic Collapse: Utopia Challenged by Its Representations,” in Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent eds., Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (New York: The New York Public Library, 2000): 357367. 49 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, trans. Desmond Lee (New York: Penguin Classics, 1971): §§ 113-121. 50 The numerous images are scattered throughout Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. Many of these images are also available at the exhibit website: http://utopia.nypl. org/Pt1exhibit.html. 51 Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin 2000). 52 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999): 60. 53 Jean Baudrillard, Paroxysm (London: Verso, 1998): 14. 37 38 97 K. C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe, 54. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Citadel Press, 1956): 5. 56 Sartre’s lengthy explication is in Being and Nothingness, xlvlxvii, 3-16. For a brief summary, see Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism (New York: Citadel, 1965): 34-37. For Sartre, existence precedes all essences. This means the universe is not the product of platonic forms or divine creators, and there are no cosmic purposes or intrinsic meanings for existence and humanity. Existence is the empirical phenomena that cannot be thought, only perceived and experienced. 57 The existential drive to fill nothingness is the ultimate source of physical and psychological needs that are tapped into by consumerism, and it is because the drive is so deep and primal that shallow or misguided consumerism often leaves so many people feeling unhappy or perpetually unfulfilled. Rather than confront their own superficiality in understanding spiritual and existential needs, such people keep consuming and hoping for a different outcome, or they quit and then mistakenly blame it all on the materialism of culture and seek salvation in deities promising destinies. 58 Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage International, 1989); Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel Press, 1957): 23. Emerging from nothingness, desire and freedom empower our quest for fullness and authenticity of being. According to Sartre, each of us must choose what to be and what it means to be. Though we are not “free” or immune from the surrounding technological or cultural conditions, in whatever form, for better or worse, we still must choose, as best we can, to make ourselves within these conditions. Sartre concluded that humans rarely lived authentically, sacrificing freedom and authenticity for security through conformity and tradition, and thus often acted irresponsibly in allowing others to determine their identity and shape their destiny. Yet, every person is always facing the choice to make him- or herself or not; to act freely and authentically as we confront existence with experience or to live inauthentically; to inhabit lives determined by dictates from the past, scriptures from the beyond, edicts from the other, or fears from the future. 59 Richard Kamber, On Sartre (Belmont, Ca.: Wadsworth, 2000): 41-44. 60 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 6-25; Kamber, On Sartre, 57-60. 54 55 98 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 16, 21, 16. Encarta World English Dictionary (New York: St. Martins, 2000): 1161. 63 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 11-16. 64 Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 64. 65 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 30-31. 66 Jean Wahl, “The Roots of Existentialism: An Introduction,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1965): 13-16. 67 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 95-96. 68 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 99. 69 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 105. 70 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, xlvii. 71 Jean-Francois Pradeau, “Plato’s Atlantis: The True Utopia,” Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, eds. Roland Schaer, Gregory Claeys, and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York: The New York Public Library, 2000): 83-91. The Hindus had a similar mythical utopian island, called Lanka, which was located at “0° longitude” and had a circular fortress city. Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 181. 72 A comprehensive account of mythical pasts and literary utopias is in Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1979): 33-114. 73 Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001): 3-46. 74 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (New York: New American Library, 1962); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 75 Barry Vacker, “Global Village or World Bazaar?,” in Alan Albarran and David Goff eds., Understanding the Web: The Political, Social, and Economic Dimensions of the Internet (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State Press, 2000): 211-237. 76 For example: Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (Toronto: Bantam Books, 19840; James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987); Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 77 Alexander Argyros, A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991): 235-237; Stephen H. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos (Chicago: 61 62 99 The University of Chicago Press, 1993): 43-44; Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 24. 78 N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos and Order: Complexity and Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991): 8. 79 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996): 155-159. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 60. Karl Popper, The Open Universe (London: Routledge, 1982): 131162. 82 John Briggs, Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos: Discovering A New Aesthetic of Art, Science, and Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992): 45. This book provides the best photographic illustrations of the natural phenomena of chaos. 83 Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 24. 84 Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 26-7. 85 Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 207-224. 86 Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, 314. 87 John Leslie, The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (London: Routledge, 1996): 48, 59. 88 Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 8-9. 89 Kauffman, At Home in the Universe, 89; Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 2-4, 28. 90 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: William Morrow, 1980); Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan 1994). 91 Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 121. 92 These are not the only reasons, as explained earlier in this book and throughout the Theory Zero series. 93 James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2000); Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003); Bill Joy, “Why the future doesn’t need us,” Wired 8.04 (April 2000); FC, The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society and Its Future (Berkeley: Jolly Roger Press, 1995) 94 Briggs, Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos, 139. 95 John Briggs and David F. Peat, Turbulent Mirror (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1989): 31-44. 96 Ivars Peterson, Newton’s Clock: Chaos in the Solar System (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1993). 97 Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1977). 80 81 100 Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 15-28. Kellert, In the Wake of Chaos, 10. 100 Benoit Mandelbrot, “Fractals — A Geometry of Nature,” in Exploring Chaos, Nina Hall ed., (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993): 122-135. 101 Ziauddin Sardar and Iwona Abrams, Introducing Chaos (New York: Totem Books, 1998): 142-143. 102 Richard P. Taylor, “Order in Pollock’s Chaos,” Scientific American (December 2002): 116-121. 103 Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 104 It seems that modernity has crashed into the possible vanishing points, the topic of Crashing Into the Vanishing Points, the second book in the Theory Zero series. 98 99 101 credits cover design: janet paz and barry vacker text layout: janet paz copyediting: elizabeth greenspan, gail bower, kerry grombacher websites: tina peterson printing: alexander's 102 philosophy cultural studies zero conditions Has the future failed humanity, or has humanity failed the future? “This is a bold and original work that offers startling insights into the ground zeros for global culture, the strange conditions facing theory and utopia for the postmillennial world.” — Carine Krecke, Universite de Provence, France Elisabeth Krecke, Universite de Paul Cezanne, France “Deploying a mix of existential and utopian philosophy to decode many strange cultural parallels, the Theory Zero series offers a visually striking critique that will inspire artists and infuriate intellectuals from across the spectrum.” — Chris Matthew Sciabarra, New York University “By mixing Sartre and Baudrillard with everyday art and architecture, Barry Vacker creates a canvas for illuminating the ‘zero’ conditions for theory, the vanishing points for the conventional ways of ‘seeing’ postmillennial culture.” — Jarice Hanson, The University of Massachusetts-Amherst ISBN-10: 0-9798404-0-6 ISBN-13: 978-0-9798404-0-1