techno-fetishism

to clarify: im using 'fetishism' to mean 'the belief that an object possesses supernatural powers' — this can include such a belief manifesting as a sexual or erotic fixation, but isnt limited to that. i also rly really don't use 'fetishism' here as a synonym for 'superstition' even though i know those things are pretty closely linked. im referring instead to the sense or intuition that suggests silicon-based technologies (but also things like mechanized weapons of war, contemporary medical technologies, and industrial technologies) have profoundly shaped our society and the trajectory of our society's future.

and like yeah that would be true of any technology, from domesticating and riding horses to like inventing sewing needles, but these industrial and silicon technologies are the most immediate and recent developments in the west and it is hard to reflect on "what theyre doing" without dealing at least a little in mysticism because were still living with their evolution — and that alone, that sense that something is changing around you but you dont know quite how it's changing or what it's heading towards, does feel quite supernatural.

like everything else mentioned in this uh. pile of word vomit. we see this fetishim manifest in the real world every day in like the most boring ways possible. executives in entertainment believe that algorithms trained on mined data will be the thing that unlocks more profit. advertisers operate on a similar principle, treating data on human behavior like proverbial tea leaves.

i know im making a bunch of big claims. and i dont mean to sound anti-silicon-technology in specific. i hope i dont. i'm mostly aiming to highlight the specific kind of techno-fetish at work here in the real world, where VCs jerk off to the power of surveillance technology to (purportedly) turn data into gold.

it's very dark, is all im trying to get at. and very boring, darkness notwithstanding.

but there are other kinds of fetish — and other aspects of the supernatural that we can encounter — with regards to technology. i think you could argue that every specific art piece ive cited here exhibits a kind of techno fetish. and that fetish, like i said already, feels like an inextricable part of cyberpunk and its descendants.

like i guess even though ive tried to avoid laying out a definitive taxonomy on What Is Cyberpunk, i do actually think that machine- and/or techno-fetish is a requirement for something to """count""" as cyberpunk. i think it's pretty impossible to grapple with the implications of power/surveillance/domination as mediated through phones, computers, the internet, medical technologies, technologies of war, and technologies of information without also confronting that our relationship to these things is somewhat mystical. further, i think we can contend with the fact that the power of technology seems somewhat supernatural while still maintaining that technology is part of humanity and humanity is part of technology.

i guess id compare that feeling of the supernatural to the way that pre-modern fetish objects might have included human-made crafts or just outright human remains (a la christian reliquaries) which did in fact come from human intervention/human bodies, but which were also believed to hold some kind of magic in them.

like jewelry adorns us and can also act as talismans; bones come from us (and seem quite alien when separated from the rest of the human body) and may possess the power of saints. why should any form of silicon-technology, which is made by us and which possesses bits of us (fingerprint data, pictures, videos, strings of code written by human beings, scanned duplicates of analog art) be regarded as somehow more separate from us or less "of us" than any other fetish object?

videodrome might be an obvious citation here for examples of fiction that rise to the challenge of this kind of cyberpunkian fetish, but i actually think crash is the choice of all of cronenberg's works that most successfully expresses this sort of techno-fetish to the point of staking out its space as one of cyberpunk's descendants. like yeah the film is also just about sexual fetishes and people who sorta want to fuck their cars and also die in the process, but it hits on something that videodrome doesnt which is just the feeling of being drawn to/intoxicated by technology and what it can do to/for/with a human body.

crash dispenses with videodrome's surreal dream sequences and its (very interesting but impossible) cybernetic gore. in surrealism's stead, crash invites us to confront the more directly "real" (insofar as fiction can be real) collapse of technology with human bodies and the supernatural qualities immanent therein.

following a bored married couple, the film lays out how ballard and catherine's entire lives and marriage are transformed by the violence of cars and what they can do to human bodies (a type of violence that would have been impossible prior to modernity). within the main cast, ballard, vaughn, and gabrielle all have bodies that were fundamentally transformed by the power of cars (thereby living up to vaughn's, like, purportedly fake mission of "reshaping of the human body by modern technology"); and gabrielle, who has been in so many car wrecks that shes permanently injured her legs, now has a kind of cyborg body expressed through her leg braces — and has also been conferred with the ability to have non-normative sex through the production of new orifices in her flesh.

theres a supernatural quality to the technology in this movie located specifically in how it alters the body and becomes part of it. for a movie void of any mention of computers or cyberspace, i think you can (and i will lmao) still argue that the film overflows with cybernetics — it's just that the cybernetics are the leg braces, the pins in ballard's knee, the IVs, and, most obviously, the cars.

which is maybe why crash is my fave of cronenbergs oeuvre. it stands out among his work and among cyberpunk in general as one of those pieces where the techno-augmentations arent expressed only as implants within the body, but also as technologies that consume it. cars become an extension of the human body or the human body becomes the wet and bloody internal organs of the car — whichever. either way, the car and the human body are enmeshed and that mystic interlacing becomes necessary for ballard and co to feel sexual stimulation, joy, fear, love, and (most importantly??) it gives them all access to the transcendental boundary between life and death.

the film is generally agnostic with regards to whether this is a good or a bad thing. it's just A Thing. the power revealed in the fetish object: transformation and annihilation.