Dark Side of the Sky
DARK SIDE OF THE SKY
How the Age of Surveillance Makes Us All Targets
Feature Essay | Dark Side of the Sky: How the Age of Surveillance Makes Us All Targets | Rolling Stone magazine | June/August, 2023
Algorithms of surveillance and analysis are not passive: they are core components within a ‘black box society’ of invisible infrastructures and opaque operations. We might only notice their presence when our number comes up, writes Mitch Goodwin. | Rolling Stone, July 27, 2023
Mitch Goodwin (2023) Falling, media assemblage.
The contemporary digital gothic moment is part of a recurring pattern of generational techno-cultural alarm, each one deeper and more visceral than the one before. There have been numerous intensifications along the way, marked by political and cultural touchpoints and technological disruptions.
In the early 1980s, society openly questioned the relationship between technological violence afforded by emergent digital systems and virtual worlds. Tron and Bladerunner (1982), The Terminator, The Twilight Zone, Videodrome, Brainstorm and even the saccharine Electric Dreams (1983) all examine our early digital dalliances with tales of cyberspace, rogue software, brain/computer interfaces and 24/7 saturation of the mediated image.
The Nineties was the next technological inflection point; a site of viral infection and virtuality. Hollywood hijacked computer code and the luminous promise of virtual reality and twisted them into the shadow play of hacker culture. This spoke to the ambiguity of cyberspace and the techno-goblins within the circuits of the network, an anxiety that was explored intensely in films like Disclosure (1994), Johnny Mnemonic, The Net, Hackers, Strange Days, Virtuosity and Ghost in the Shell (all 1995).
Cyberspace was alive and the technological ecologies of its making were intoxicating. Networked virtuality was its most addictive drug. Today, the techno-cultural narrative remains analogous to a viral infection — it touches all of us through both proximity and subterfuge, as mediated by the black mirror of device culture and the creeping ubiquity of machine learning and automation.
It’s also fast becoming a site of virtuality. This time however, the graphics are more convincing, and the ‘real world’ a horror worth escaping.
Mitch Goodwin w/ Midjourney (2023) TV Eye
Original article available on Rolling Stone
