Koyaanisqatsi
0.
ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.
—From the film Koyaanisqatsi
Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide.
—Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
1.
The year is still ending as I begin this. Where I am, only three days remain. Many of you exist 12–15 hours in my past, though, so your year’s remaining days are closer to four. Not that we actually exist in different years or days. Even though we actually sometimes do.
There was a time when I didn’t think like this, when I didn’t place the parts of the world into their timezones and current times of days. But that time is gone now. I am here, and you are there, and the others are wherever they are, and there’s no escaping the fact that we are all, in many ways, living out of balance.
In other ways, though, we are living very much in sync. I’m a consumer, just like you, for example. I spend time online. I watch movies there. I buy books that I read on the indispensable device to my left. I respond to the text messages that I receive on the diabolical device to my right. I have digital lists that I add digital items to on Amazon. I even have a VPN that I pay nearly $100 a year for, just so I can have access to digital things not available to me over here in the Southeast Asian future where I reside. And some of those region-specific things must be paid for, too, because otherwise, how would I consume them? So I pay for them. Then I consume them. Then I go back for more, still licking all the zeros and ones from my fingers.
Every now and then, though, the stars align and one of the region-specific digital things that I want can, with a VPN, be consumed for free. For free, that is, with ads. Lots of them spliced into my digital “content” like dicks spliced into film by Tyler Durden, the main difference being that the dicks I see last for a minute or more rather than a sixtieth of a second.1 When the content is, in fact, just content, something being presented to me with the goal of becoming something being sold to me, the dicks are barely an intrusion, as they are just one more thing being sold to me. Never mind that I’ve never bought a dick or considered buying one and that no ad is going to change that.
Earlier this week, I witnessed an even rarer occurrence. Something so rare, at least in my experience, that I’m going to call it the movie-watching equivalent of a hybrid solar eclipse, which another major source of ad-heavy digital content tells me occurs only a few times a century. I came across actual artistic expression that, unfortunately for me, wasn’t available in my location. That wasn’t the hybrid solar eclipse, though. The hybrid solar eclipse occurred just after I logged into my “USA - Los Angeles - 1” VPN, refreshed my Amazon tab, and prepared to purchase the digital movie that I would then proceed to consume. Doing so produced on my screen the fair-enough words: “Watch now: Free with ads.” I was skeptical, but I clicked through to the movie’s main page anyway, where the proclamation was confirmed thusly: “Free with ads on Freevee,” and there again, next to the play button: “Watch now: Free with ads.”
I clicked play. Then I watched Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi. Free. With ads. On Amazon Freevee.
For the unfamiliar, here’s IMDB’s description of the film:
A collection of expertly photographed phenomena with no conventional plot. The footage focuses on nature, humanity, and the relationship between them.
And here’s The Criterion Collection’s more florid description:
An unconventional work in every way, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi was nevertheless a sensation when it was released in 1983. This first work of The Qatsi Trilogy wordlessly surveys the rapidly changing environments of the Northern Hemisphere, in an astonishing collage created by the director, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass. It shuttles viewers from one jaw-dropping vision to the next, moving from images of untouched nature to others depicting human beings’ increasing dependence on technology Koyaanisqatsi’s heterodox methods (including hypnotic time-lapse photography) make it a look at our world from a truly unique angle.
If you’ve seen the film (and perhaps even if you only read the descriptions above), then you probably already understand how unsettling it might be to see all of those lengthy dicks spliced into it. Dicks for financial services. Dicks for travel websites. Dicks for cookies. Dicks for taquitos. Dicks for toothpaste. Dicks for gentler toothpaste. Dicks for vacuum cleaners. Dicks for voice-controlled robot vacuum cleaners. Dicks for cars. Dicks for car insurance. Dicks for car-buying apps. Dicks for broken dreams and the latest gadgets for fixing them, all spliced into Reggio’s early 80s cinematic expression of how our technological advancements have (already) devoured us and our earth.
If you’ve not seen the film, I recommend checking to see if it’s still available to watch for free with dicks. Because it really is an experience. You could also buy it and watch it without dicks, as I since have, but there’s something profound about rejoicing in the hybrid solar eclipse that is watching it spliced with such a modern array of phalli. It’s a limited-time offer, though. So act now, while supplies last.
2.
It’s now two days to midnight. By the grace of the gods of YouTube videos, Apple computers, Fender speakers, and their their many past and present collaborators, Tom Waits is here with me. He’s still onstage singing “Day After Tomorrow,” nearly 20 years on from the night of the show, playing a guitar that would look too small for him if I weren’t so used to seeing it already, and if Waits hadn’t always appeared—in body and spirit and sound—like a large little rascal to me, mischievous, yes, but also charming; wise beyond his years since at least the 70s, and still brimming with the sensitive stuff of mirth and myth today, as he voyages through his seventh decade here on Earth. The video is seven minutes and thirteen seconds long, and I am pleased to report that nowhere in my many journeys through that time this morning have I encountered any dicks.
Where does technology begin and end? And what about us? Where does our humanity begin and end? Where is the line that, when crossed, turns us into cyborgs? Have we already crossed it? When? Was it when we moved our identities and relationships and lives into all those addictive algorithmic rectangles in our hands? Was it when the internet lured us online? Was it color TVs? Black-and-white ones? Movies? Radios? Newspapers? Books? The printing press? The Digital Revolution? The Green Revolution? The Second Industrial Revolution? The Second Agricultural Revolution? The first ones?
Was it even earlier? Was it, as Ted Chiang has suggested in his fiction, when we started turning objects and thoughts into symbols?
We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound. [2 ]
Was it even earlier? Was it in the red ochre that our ancestors sprayed on their hands to make cave art?
Was it even earlier? Was it in our ancestors themselves? Did technology and our current cyborg era come online the moment we did? Is the line somewhere in our consciousness? Is our consciousness the line?3
Suppose it is. Is that a license to go wild? Is it a license to take technology as far as it can go, to build towers into the skies, simulated realties into our environments and minds, synthetic habitats into our solar system? Is that progress? Is it sustainable? Is it desirable? Or is it just the doomed lifework of a species possessed?
Suppose it is all of that. Suppose our consciousness denotes the cyborg line, and that crossing it denotes our inevitable, eventual collapse. Do you find an odd comfort, a strange peace, in that? I do. I find as well a sort of transient triumph of spirit. Some unnameable good fortune in the story of humans and technology that might otherwise be only tragic.
3.
At the recommendation of
, I recently acquired two books by the philosopher Byung-Chul Han: (1) The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, and (2) Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld.I read the first chapters of each book a couple weeks ago now, but I’ve since found myself unable to move past them. They’re very short, as are the chapters that follow them, as are the books as a whole. It’s just that there’s so much packed in almost every—also short—paragraph and sentence, most of which read to me like a key to a lock that opens to reveal new locks and keys that are up to me to sort out before I proceed.
In the first chapter of Rituals, titled “The Compulsion of Production,” Han writes:
We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it.
[…]
Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold. Time that rushes off is not habitable.
For those unfamiliar with Han and his work, a reasonable question to ask right now is: When is today? Not in the timezone-dependent sense that I began this essay with, but in the sense of: When is the broader today from/about which Han is writing? Good question. The English-language version of the book was published in 2020. The original German-language version looks to have been published a year earlier.
Does your today often feel like “an erratic stream” rushing past you? Mine does. It does beyond the bounds of my rituals, anyway. The work I do in my day job; the digital feeding tubes I can’t escape that send flawed representations of the world and its inhabitants to me 24/7; the belief that AI will one day give humans more free time crashing hard against the inverse belief that AI is more likely to give us more work and less free time via enabling us to produce more output per human-AI combo; the actual “erratic stream” of content that “disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences” day after day—these are the unholdable and uninhabitable things that I see rushing past me in my own time-home.
Han continues, looking deeper into how rituals render time habitable:
Rituals stabilize life. To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their ‘relative independence from men’. They ‘have the function of stabilizing human life’. Their ‘objectivity lies in the fact that … men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table’. In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.
(I will ask you here to please remember what I said above about AI entering the workforce, and potentially feeding the “contemporary compulsion to produce” that already “robs things of their endurance” and “intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption.”)
Han goes on to highlight my pick for both Stability-Destroyer of the Year and Stability-Destroyer of the Decade (the century’s still young, but fingers crossed):
A smartphone is not a ‘thing’ in Arendt’s sense. It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life. It is also not a particularly enduring object. It differs from a thing like a table, which confronts me in its self-sameness. The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible. The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing. The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.
In the first chapter of Non-things, “From Things to Non-things,” Han writes: “Everything that stabilizes human life is time-consuming.” He goes on to list faithfulness, bonding, and commitment as some of life’s time-consuming practices. He then writes more about lingering in a paragraph that I’ve shared with just about everyone who has so much as looked in my digital direction these past two weeks:
Lingering is another time-consuming practice. Perception that latches on to information does not have a lasting and slow gaze. Information makes us short-sighted and short of breath. It is not possible to linger on information. Lingering on things in contemplation, intentionless seeing, which would be a formula for happiness, gives way to the hunt for information. Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice of everything without gaining any insight. We travel across the world without having an experience. We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.
We are not all the same, of course. The only thing we all are, in fact, is different. But in a broad sense, I don’t think that we can dispute any of those charges. Being the endlessly complex beasts of individuality that we are, some of us can probably plead not guilty to a few of them. But as a self-appointed and untrained lawyer representing the capital-W We, I’m afraid I must now raise my head from my mess of yellow legal pads to inform Our Honor that We are guilty on all counts, and that We would like to, I don’t know [looking down in shame at the ground now], I mean, if His Honor doesn’t mind [still looking down, but now also with hands in pockets, kicking the bone dust of Our pulverized collective self-worth], maybe We could, you know, talk about how, I don’t know, how We might maybe stop being such stupid and non-lingering techno-idiots [a bullroarer roars in the distance], and maybe even, if it’s okay with you, I mean, Your Honor, maybe We could even avoid jail time, maybe We could live lives less jailed, I mean, if you think that that would be fair, I mean, is all I’m saying, is all We’re saying, Your Honor. [The bullroarer fades to silence.] So what do you say?
4.
What follows is the official transcript of the final ruling in the case We v. Us and Our Oopsiest Technologies, as transcribed by the Nth Circuit Court’s Luna G. Woo and delivered by the Honorable Judge John Jacob J. Schmidt IX.
Ladies, gentlemen.
There’s a film that I watched with my son shortly before he passed called Wristcutters: A Love Story. The film is set in an afterlife way station reserved for those who’ve committed suicide. In one scene, set at night in a campground inhabited by artists, the camp’s eccentric leader, played by Tom Waits, delivers a slideshow and tells a story. Here is that story:
“Once upon a time, there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. And they grew next to each other. And every day the straight tree would look at the crooked tree, and he would say, ‘You're crooked. You've always been crooked and you'll continue to be crooked. But look at me! Look at me!’ said the straight tree. He said, ‘I'm tall, and I'm straight.’ And then one day the lumberjacks came into the forest and looked around, and the manager in charge said, ‘Cut all the straight trees.’ And that crooked tree is still there to this day, growing strong and growing strange.”
My son, who taught English as a second language and was a full-grown crooked tree, loved this story. He tried to teach it to his students a few times, but it always fell flat. He said it was something about the way the word “crooked” translated to his students’ first language, and the way that being different, being an individual, often meant having something to hide in his students’ culture, or at least in their school’s culture.
Now that my boy has been gone for some years, I see another thing in the story that I think he saw, too. I think he saw in it the lesson that the lumberjacks, much like our more modern “machines”—and the consumers and economies that they feed—are coming for us, and that the best way to maintain one’s humanity in such an environment, and perhaps even the only way to maintain one’s soul, was to not acquiesce. I admired that. I still do. But what good is one’s humanity when one stands strong and strange but alone in a land consumed? What good is it when all of one’s sense of stability, duration, community, and purpose has been swallowed up? What good is it when one’s human thirst for knowledge, insight, experience, recollection, and other humans falls prey to a world hell-bent on replacing the reality of such things with only a simulacrum of them? I’m asking rhetorically, of course. But these are the sort of questions that I think haunted my son, and that, in the end, delivered him to his demise.
It needn’t be so, ladies and gentlemen. Not for those of us still here.
We, if I may address you as such, you’re not wrong to see where this is going. You’re not wrong to feel in your hearts a phantom of longing for a long-gone day. You’re not wrong to feel the ache of separation from your early ancestors, from their days of hard-won purpose, from their nights of big sky lights.
You’re not wrong to sense that the coldness of our increasingly digital and online world marks another step in our collective journey toward death. You’re not wrong to prefer the digital world’s analog predecessor. You’re not wrong to be drawn to its disappearing warmth. You’re not wrong to look back on it with wistful eyes and hearts and minds. And you’re not wrong to want to preserve it. You’re right on all counts. But we’re still all journeying toward death. And you can’t stop whatever tech is here now or will soon follow any more than you can stop your own death. Never mind all those who are bored and trying. They’ll add on some sad years for sure, but sad they will be.
There’s no stopping death. Nor should there be. It might just be life’s only muse. What would we have left without it but somber wishes for its return?
It is according to my duties under the jurisdiction of the Nth Circuit Court that I rule in favor of Us and Our Oopsiest Technologies. If for no other reason then because there’s no stopping them or us. That’s just how it is. It’s just who we are. Try to enjoy it. Don’t go thinking you can prepare and then leave a better world for a future that you know nothing about. You can’t. Your time is now. Their time will come later. The best you can do with your time here is follow Ram Dass’ advice, and be here now. Use only the tech that enriches you and avoid the rest. Remember these words: Music is technology. Books are technology. Movies, including those sad and beautiful ones that are radically against technology, are technology. Writing is technology. Language is technology. Communication is technology. Community is technology. And you. You are technology. Your consciousness is part of a larger machination. And that great tale, too, will one day reach its end. There is tragedy in that, yes. But there is also comedy. There is also poetry. There is also triumph, and there is also defeat. And that is my ruling.
We, I acknowledge and accept your plea of guilty but sentence you to nothing but finding your way forward. Your world is a mess. Some would say it’s your best mess yet. Others would disagree. Others still would disagree emphatically. I myself choose to remain neutral. I have learned over the years that trying to turn incoherent questions into coherent answers is a recipe only for madness. Anyone who claims to have coherent answers to incoherent questions is full of you know what.
You owe your allegiance to no certainty. If you want to pledge your allegiance to something, pledge it to your infinite uncertainty.
You owe the internet nothing. You owe social media nothing. You owe the economy nothing. You owe the culture warriors and their wars nothing. All you owe anyone is the best version of yourself that you can muster. That’s it. But you do owe it to everyone, and you do owe it every day. That’s all we’re doing here. That’s the only part that really matters, anyway. The rest is just a series of questions and expressions. Which ones will help bring about the best you? Which ones will help you and your neighboring trees grow strong and strange and crooked but connected? Which ones will help you and your fellow cognitive machines to stay human and inspired and interiorly ablaze?
Technology will go on and on with or without you. You don’t have a choice in the matter. You do have a choice, though, in determining what of it works for you, and what of it works against you. From there, I can offer some suggestions.
If the advancement suits you, use it. If it does not, stay away from it. If it chases you, run. If it catches you, resist. If it traps you, get creative. If it crushes you, push back. If it kills you, well, congratulations on your transient triumph. Congratulations to us all, for that matter. Because we’re all going the same way. May we meet again on the other side, or on some other side, or in some other time or form or space.
For now, though, may we all just go home.
Hug your kids, folks. Hug your folks, kids. Imagine your partner dying in an accident so that when they come home later you can love them that much more. Love them while they’re here and remember them when they’re gone.
This court is adjourned.
5.
Rereading Judge Schmidt’s ruling just now, with under 24 hours to go before midnight ICT, at which point the new year’s balls will drop over here in the East, symbolizing new beginnings and the early stages of male puberty, I can’t help but wonder what everything written here means, what it all amounts to, how it’s all connected, how those connective tissues might help us to imbue our time in 2024 and beyond with a more solid structure.
I don’t know how to answer that wonder. Not for you, anyway. For me, all I know for sure is that I want to fill more of my time with more of the things that allow me the space to linger. I know this, and I know that my road to more lingering will be lined with more routines and rituals, those meaningful repetitions and returns that serve to both preserve and restore life’s endurance.
Conspicuously absent from my vision of that road are the many less meaningful forms of technology that get pushed on us moderns regularly from all directions. Absent, that is, insofar as I can keep those fiendish dogs at bay.
6.
Speaking with Kmele Foster in a 2023 interview, conducted some 40 years after the release of Koyaanisqatsi and in the same year as the release of his latest film, Once Within a Time, an 83-year-old Godfrey Reggio highlights the challenge inherent in separating ourselves from our technologies:
I not only use technology, I with my crew create technology that hasn't been created before. And yet, my films are radically against technology. So technology is the environment we live in. It's not an addendum to it. It's not just to make things more efficient. It's that we can't live without it.
The interview proceeds with a light, but reasonable, dissent from Foster:
While I consider myself less skeptical of technology, Godfrey is touching on something that many of us feel. Technological innovations have connected the world and provided innumerable benefits. And yet, many of us feel increasingly disconnected from one another. For Godfrey, it comes down to interrogating our habits and intentions. Because while some habits can lock us into a rut, others can help us unlock our potential. [...]
When we’re returned to Reggio sitting slumped but animated in his chair, he expands on the importance of, as Foster put it, “interrogating our habits”:
The Dalai Lama was in Albuquerque in '91 giving a big lecture, and after the lecture he said, "I'll take a few questions." A young lady jumps up and says, "Your Holiness, what's the single most important thing I can do?" "Routine. Next question." That's who we are. We become what we do.
Let me ask you this: Is it the content of your mind that determines your behavior? Or is it your behavior that determines the content of your mind? It's not a trick question, but it can sound that way. For nine out of eight of us, it's our behavior that determines the content of our mind. What we do every day without question is who we are.
Here we’re met with a clip of fast-motion scenes from Koyaanisqatsi. Under the racing Philip Glass score, we see people from over four decades ago moving up and down escalators and passing through the terminal of New York City’s Grand Central Station. We see lone individuals staring deeply into the camera as trains blast by behind them. We see buildings and towers collapsing. We see a section of bridge doing the same. We see a raging cloud. We see a raging wave. We see a bright light and a dark cave. We see canyons. We see peaks. We see valleys. We see sunlight and shadows. We see a rolling mist. We see the shooting sparks of a rocket launch. We see the Holy Ghost panel in the Great Gallery at Horseshoe Canyon.
We see the clip end. We return to 2023. We see Reggio hunched over the desk in his studio. We hear him start to say:
I believe in this [Polish proverb]: "Begin and the work shall show you how." Meaning discovers you if you put yourself in the occasion. Look at it this way, if you were with your beloved at a sunset, you wouldn't ask your beloved, "I wonder what the sun means tonight." You would say, "Was it a meaningful experience?" That's what we're looking for. […] I've never stopped doing what I'm doing right now. And I haven't changed since I was a young kid. It's not how long we live, it's how intense we live, how much we control our own life, our own destiny. This is what I do. You become what you do.
7.
It is now seven hours to midnight ICT. By the time you read this, the year will be young again. (Mine will, anyway; yours might have some mutating still to do.) The monks here will have walked barefoot through the streets giving out chanted blessings in exchange for processed snacks from 7-Eleven. And then we will all go on doing what we do.
My wife is waiting patiently for me to tear myself away from this thing that I’m becoming and instead throw myself back into life. And indeed, it is time.
Hug your kids, folks. Hug your folks, kids. Imagine your partner dying in an accident so that when they come home later you can love them that much more. Love them while they’re here and remember them when they’re gone.
This court is adjourned.
From
’s Fight Club:You’re a projectionist and you’re tired and angry, but mostly you’re bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame of a lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina close-up into another feature movie.
This is one of those pet adventures, when the dog and cat are left behind by a traveling family and must find their way home. In reel three, just after the dog and cat, who have human voices and talk to each other, have eaten out of a garbage can, there’s the flash of an erection.
Tyler does this.
A single frame in a movie is on the screen for one-sixtieth of a second. Divide a second into sixty equal parts. That’s how long the erection is. Towering four stories tall over the popcorn auditorium, slippery red and terrible, and no one sees it.
[...]
Tyler spliced a penis into everything after that. Usually, close-ups, or a Grand Canyon vagina with an echo, four stories tall and twitching with blood pressure as Cinderella danced with her Prince Charming and people watched. Nobody complained. People ate and drank, but the evening wasn’t the same. People feel sick or start to cry and don’t know why. Only a hummingbird could have caught Tyler at work.
From the story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation: Stories
Thanks to
for wondering in my direction whether or not it’s valid to view self-awareness as a form of technology, and humans as tech-enabled chimps. Those ideas added a particular thrust to what I’ve written here that might have been missing in their absence.