After a long day of work, or even after returning from a nice vacation, my partner and I will sit down and turn on the television to watch a show. Our desire for the novel often finds us seeking out entertainment that we have not yet witnessed. Spectacle is certainly pervasive.
In seeking out our entertainment, we often take risks. The risk that a particular show or story will not be nearly as impressive or thought provoking as something we have seen in the past. Recently, our journey brought us to Snowflake Mountain.
Like any good train wreck, we had watched several episodes before my partner finally put her foot down. We simply could not watch this reality series any further after the disaster that ensued for the bit we did somehow tolerate. This show is so bad, we had to place it among such greats as Battlefield Earth.
Briefly, the show follows a group of rather entitled, very privileged, young adults who have been tricked into attending survival training in the wilderness. However, to say tricked may not entirely be accurate, as it seems clear after the opening episode, that these people are remaining entirely out of their own volition. In fact, it is almost as if they had decided to attend to try and better themselves.
Thus, the first major issue with this show is the inconsistent, often contradictory information the audience receives regarding the status of the contestants and what may or may not be going on. This is quickly followed up with the obvious issue with their alleged instructors, who themselves are equally entitled, privileged, and young. Of course, the instructors allegedly come from far more qualifying backgrounds, having allegedly served in the military.
I am by no means an expert at survival in the wilderness, but I confess an interest in such things. It started when my partner took a liking to the series Naked and Afraid. If you are not already aware, the level of fabrication in that show boggles the mind. When stacked against the likes of the History Channel’s Alone series, there is a great deal of wonder how inexperienced people with no clothing and the option of merely one object to take with them are able to survive longer than experienced survivalists with over 20 survival items as well as the clothes on their back.
The inconsistencies in Snowflake Mountain are hard enough to take, but the contestants themselves are somehow worse. Their inability to navigate basic social interactions with other people make me wonder how they have survived this long in an urban setting, never mind something more rustic. Are these people real? I am convinced they must be actors playing a part.
It is as if the definition the show offers, that a snowflake is “a young person who is considered overly emotional, easily offended, and dramatic,” was actually used in order to generate characters of appropriate stereotyping to meet the show’s requirements. If people like this actually exist in our modern world, God help us all.
Another noteworthy mention includes deciding that using a hachet to chop down a tree is reasonable (and safer) than using a proper axe. My god, the contestants hand is mere inches from the strike zone, and the instructors seem to find this acceptable. Of course, those with keen eyes may have noticed that the tree was prepared ahead of time, its upper trunk secured with ropes before they even begin. Whew, thank God they were keeping safety in mind for these poor snowflakes.
I am ranting. I apologize. Best to get to the point of all this.
There was a film that came out in 2006 entitled Idiocracy. It was a comedy, offering an extremely cynical view of what our future might hold. The premise is simple enough: consider that those in our society who seem to contribute the most are too busy to procreate, leaving those who are bleeding the social systems dry to fill the empty spaces with their offspring. Such a situation would seem to suggest that those genetically gifted with higher intelligence and greater innate abilities will be weeded out of the gene pool, given a sufficient amount of time, lowering the average global intelligence of all populations on this planet. Thus, the story spends most of its time about 500 years in our future, in a world that results from such circumstances.
When the audience is first introduced to one of these future people, we find him sitting in the laziest La-Z-Boy to have ever graced existence, complete with built in toilet, so one never has to miss their favorite show. And we find this person watching an incredibly large, 100 inch screen only a couple feet from his face. Sounds like at home IMAX, if not for the inhuman amount of advertising on the screen. There are so many ads surrounding the actual content, that the content itself is contained in a box smaller than most people’s modern laptop monitors.
And why stop there. The content is itself incredibly important. This man is watching his favorite show. It is actually most people’s favorite show we later find out. The title of this show is Ow! My Balls! A reality show where the protagonist is pummeled with an array of objects to his groin.
As the story progresses, the audience is provided many, many more examples of how the ethics and morality have degenerated over the centuries, suggesting that popular coffee shops, like Starbucks, now offer handjobs as part of their combination deals.
The show is meant to be funny. The story is entirely tongue in cheek. Anyone who thinks this show is even attempting to say anything serious ought to be drawn and quartered. And yet, here I am suggesting that it has something rather important to say.
When stacked up to the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even my dear Ghost in the Shell, it is immediately clear that the picture Idiocracy paints is far, far more likely to take place. In fact, as is indicated by the very title of the former, in 2001 we have barely left this planet, let alone colonized the moon or sent our first manned mission to Jupiter. In the latter, we are only a few years away from cyberbrains, allegedly to appear on the market as soon as 2029; that is less than 7 years from now.
I won’t go into the issues with mind/body dualism here. Only that I think Ghost in the Shell cannot be as a result of a misunderstanding regarding how human minds and bodies relate to one another. Nor will I dwell on the fact that many of the events taking place over the past two years would seem to suggest a complete reversal of the “progress” humans have achieve over the past hundred.
Were I to take a moment and try to predict the future as I think it would unfold, considering that I was a child during a time when there were no laptops, no cellular phones (never mind smartphones), no iPods, barely tone phones, no CDs, no DVDs, barely home computers, no Internet, etc… I would suggest that the next hundred years will look much like the previous, except for there being a much grander illusion of change. That is, human activity will, I think, continue to behave in much the same fashion as it has for the past two millennia, with the wealthy and powerful continuing to oppress and exploit the majority of people, utilizing the tools of mass manipulation (such as marketing and propaganda and religion and government), in order to get what they want. The technology will change, sure. It will appear that things get easier, though the reverse will be the case.
There is only one thing that I think can stop the engine of humanity dead in its tracks, and that will be the Earth itself. Mother Nature. Maybe. As we clearly do not understand it as well as we might like or think that we do, it is hard to say whether the world is really coming to an end right now. Hard to say whether the amount of damage we have caused will really end all life, or even simply human life, or whether the former or the latter will simply continue in some evolved form or another.
I am reminded of a book I read as a child: The Last Gasp. Trevor Hoyle suggests that when the end comes, though the Earth will be unable to sustain human life, and probably many others, life itself will find a way and another species better adapted to the new environment will gain dominance. As Charles Darwin suggested, it will truly be survival of the fittest.