Posthuman Blues

"[T]oday we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

"The bombardment of pseudorealities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly [italics mine]. Fake realities will create fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride -- you can have all of them, but none is true."

--Philip K. Dick

The vapid corporate environment (see post below) is a perfect example of a pseudoreality. If Philip K. Dick wrote a book about a cubicle farm, I imagine it would be elaborately paranoid. Like his androids, PKD's "fake humans" don't know they're fake. That's what makes the onrush of media/profit-dictated realities so inescapable.

"What could a man living in 1750 have learned about himself by observing the behavior of a donkey steam engine? Could he have watched it huffing and puffing and then extrapolated from its labor an insight into why he himself continutally fell in love with one certain type of pretty young girl? This would not have been primitive thinking on his part; it would have been pathological. But now we find ourselves immersed in a world of our own making so intricate, so mysterious, that as Stanislaw Lem, the eminent Polish science fiction writer, theorizes, the time may come when, for example, a man may have to be restrained from attempting to rape a sewing machine."

--Philip K Dick once again, sounding remarkably like J.G. Ballard.