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DanaDelgerFirstPaper 3 - 19 Nov 2009 - Main.DanaDelger
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| | | The dream censor is responsible for the distorted vision of dreaming. When is a cigar not just a cigar? When your subconscious wish cannot be fulfilled in the context of the social mores of the world in which you live, and indeed your mind cannot even admit its existence--- here enters the dream censor. It is by this light that we can understand the digital dream. When the Facebook machine looks at your profile, reads your digital memory and aggregates the small movements of your day-to-day life to produce the target ads which reveal the subconscious wish, it is dreaming. But where the biologic dream is opaque, the digital dream is crystalline. What do you want? Ask your dreams and come up with only a handful of runes. Ask your Facebook, and all your wants are known. It reveals the wish before you know you had it, just as the biologic dream does, except here there is no censor to keep you from the truth. | |
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< | On the surface, this may not seem troublesome. There is perhaps an autonomy interest lost in giving control of the digital dream to another, but who indeed feels that he controls his bodily dreams at all? For many, the gee-whiz world of new products meant just for you! is a sufficient trade-off for all sorts of losses to privacy and freedom more tangible than the harm to the “digital dream.” But this misunderstands the equation, for there is a real and heavy price for the loss of our control over what may seem an ethereal fiction. Return to the question: Why does the dream censor keep us from the true nature of our desire? Why do we dream at all? We dream, and we dream obscured, because not all wishes should be fulfilled. | >
> | On the surface, this may not seem troublesome. There is perhaps an autonomy interest lost in giving control of the digital dream to another, but who indeed feels that he controls his bodily dreams at all? For many, the gee-whiz world of new products meant just for you! is a sufficient trade-off for all sorts of losses to privacy and freedom more tangible than the harm to the “digital dream.” But this misunderstands the equation, for there is a real and heavy price for the loss of our control over what may seem an ethereal fiction. Return to the question: Why does the dream censor keep us from the true nature of our desire? Why do we dream at all? We dream, and we dream obscured, because not all wishes should be fulfilled. | | |
In Freud's view, the terror of the suppressed wish was its nature, which was typically incestuous or aggressive, precisely the desires which all men share and of which all civilizations demand destruction. But we should fear the very existence of the wish rather than its content; it is being told that we want at all that destroys. For whatever else the purpose of the life of man is or should be, it is not blind and constant consumption. We were born to be more than machines that exist solely to put money in other men’s coffers, but we have little hope of being anything else when unhampered access to our machinized memory has allowed the Facebook to dream our dreams for us. And while those dreams are perfection indeed, the satisfaction of all desire comes at the price of enslavement to a system which requires that we sell our souls so we have money to buy. According to Freud, the satisfaction of every man’s desire would lead to the dissolution of society; so too in ours, though it is not merely civilized order that we will lose, but ourselves entirely. A digital dream which makes it impossible to say no to this world is one that we should awaken from, as if a nightmare. |
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