Gustible - under the rubric of [$_SELF]

I am imagining a world where all is commodity. Everything is for sale. The world I am thinking of is different from the world we live in right now in one respect – experience is for sale too. In a safe and sanitized way.

A world where you can have it all – despair, ecstasy, starvation, gluttony, abstention, orgies, murder, birth…safely, without having to take either a bath or anti-retrovirals afterwards. And cheap.

How can this happen ? We are already moving in this direction. Mindless television let us peer into the worlds inhabited by the rich and famous, and the worlds of the poor and decrepit. Travel agents promise us “real cultural” experiences. The internet connects us to those of the poor who are blessed by UN provided connectivity. It lets you send messages of love to the pope. You can visit favellas and townships as a tourist (yes, it will cost you 100 times what the inhabitants earn in a month, but you will be contributing to their upliftment, won’t you) and you can learn how the other 90% lives. The tiny majority who can dispose of the majority of the world’s resources are buying – we wan’t the experience, we wan’t it to be risk free, and we want parental controls. We should not worry about the technicalities of this – it will happen, because we are creating the market.

I am more interested in the ethics: here is the question – “is it wrong to experience emotion without commitment ?” Let me be specific – is it wrong to experience someone else’s {ecstasy} (replace with pain, despair, fun, joy, epiphany {whatever})  without being intimately familiar and empathic with the contex of that person’s life ? Can it do harm to experience without empathy – I mean harm in the real sense of harm: can it hurt me in an essential manner, can it hurt those who produce the content, can it hurt society ? I do not know the answer.
We can always take the easy way out and use pornography as a proxy for the immersive “full-frontal cultural experience” we are postulating. Does pornography harm those involved in producing it ? Does pornography hurt society ? Pornography is probably the most immersive experience we currently have – we can use the web to see, hear and feel sex from a distance. Sex exists and thrives in the virtual worlds (such as they are).

The debate about pornography is a very old debate – I wish to propose that we move beyond it, and consider the pornography of the real. What constitutes the pornography of the real ? In essence it is a packaging and commoditisation of experience, all experience. Without the burden and responsibility of empathy.

Right now I do not have an answer. My gut feeling is that this kind of pornography would be harmful – but it is not a considered response to the question. Alternative views include the possibility that we can learn without endangering our lives (thereby circumventing some of the more stringent and unpleasant rules of evolution). Not all great writers and poets die in misery, in pain or in the throes of addiction – many went gently into the good night.

Technology will very soon offer us ways to have a truly new experience, to ziplessly fuck the world – with no giving and no taking. Still, on an emotional level I feel that there is always a giving and a taking – and I think that identifying the taker is less easy than the zipless ones like to think.

Quoting the great and densely zippered Leonard Cohen: “Give me crack and anal sex, Take the only tree that’s left and stuff it up the hole in your culture. … I’ve seen the future brother: it is murder”. Amen.

PS: This post has been written as an experiment in jet-lag, and also constructed as an opportunity to tag a post with really audience-attractive tags (see SEO).