Reality needs fantasy to render it desirable
In a time of entire synthetic universes like Fortnite, AI-powered face filters or global fake news, it’s time to frame facts in such a way that they make sense and hold meaning for everyday people
Image from Red Dead Redemption II, a 2018 action-adventure game developed and published by Rockstar Games.
The past few decades have been marked by two generalized transformations in “advanced societies”. The first one has been the emergence of a network technology that have transformed every sphere of life. These newer networked communication technologies, like the internet and mobile phones, represent a global shift and it has been nothing short of a technological revolution: profound empowerment of individuals, greater access to information or formidable tools for networking. The second transformation has been around how production is carried out, where and by whom. The last decades have witnessed the rise of a more flexible mode of capitalist accumulation: globalized production, decentralization, mass customization, outsourcing, etc. However, both transformations (technological and capitalist) are characterized by sharing exactly the same keywords and examples: the “new economy”, Silicon Valley, Amazon, Google, the rise of India, etc. This close affinity between a new capitalism and a new technology denote a pretty obvious significance: emerging technologies play a central role in the legitimation of a techno-political order[1].
Nowadays, technology is really significant in shaping the political, cultural and social spirit of our societies, and the digital revolution has become one of the central ideas of the recent times. This idea of technology (or ideology), gains in itself a constitutive role in society. As Howard P. Segal explains, with modernity “technology has become not just the material basis for society but in a real sense its social and ideological model as well”.[2]
An assembly bench in Foxconn’s Longhua complex in Shenzhen, China, where iPhones are manufactured.
Network technology is at the heart of a radical break in social life. Today, the perception of the world sits most of the time in an infinite landscape of representations of reality: images, videos, messages and simulations of any kind. Our current cultural conditions are characterized by being constantly influenced by multiple layers of information that shape how we perceive the world. Recent changes in technology have had a considerable impact on society during the recent decades, and this context facilitated changes in the status of concepts like truth and reality, both fundamental concepts for western civilizations.
Nowadays, we still trust a phone call from a friend, or a video clip featuring a known politician, simply because we recognize their voices and faces, and consequently, we treat those materials as authentic by definition. However, the proliferation of lifelike synthetic realities is questioning this idea — entire synthetic universes like viral videogames such as Fortnite, popular AI-powered face filters integrated in our reality, or Deepfake technologies that generate from scratch realistic videos, images and audio. Today, the distinction between fact and fiction is blurred as never before and we see how the boundary separating them gets increasingly soft. The digital revolution has completely transformed how we perceive the world. Nowadays, the individual perception of truth is more significant than truth itself.
Screenshot from: "Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio"
During the last few years, we have seen how these changes have transformed the political arena all over the world. We have seen how facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. The word “post-truth” (2016 Word of the Year) was popularized during the United States Presidential Elections and also during the EU Brexit Referendum. Since then, the word post-truth has been used to define contemporary times in which elements of truth are combined with doses of exaggeration in order to cause stir. Its most distinctive feature is the primacy of emotions over facts, in which language is selected to trigger emotional reactions that are used to involve emotionally and provoke specific reactions. Weaned on endless images, videos, advertisements and films, and driven by a mass media and a consumer economy that benefit from emotional narratives and overhyped stories, today truth and power belong to those who tell the better story.
Some months ago, I came up with a sentence written by Stephen Duncombe. In his book, he said that today “reality and fantasy don’t inhabit separate spheres. Reality needs fantasy to render desirable, just as fantasy needs reality to make it believable”[3]. Today, living in this certainly controversial time, it’s important to start thinking less about presenting facts (and preserving old standards of truth and reality) and start thinking more about how to frame these facts in such a way that they make sense and hold meaning for everyday people. And design practices may have something to do with that.
Most people believe design is problem solving, sometimes aesthetic problems. But the only way to overcome many of the challenges of today is crafting our values, beliefs and behaviors.[4] In this context of full fantasy, in which the old standards of truth and reality are changing, a new generation of designers are focusing their practice to critique, question and challenge the complexities of our world. Here, design can be used as a means of speculating how things could be; as a tool to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want.
Image from the post-factual documentary film “Unknown Unknowns” (2020)
Sometimes these works take different kind of forms but all of them are intended to show new perspectives on complex problems to thrive people’s imagination. Design can be used to inspire and encourage others, and at the same time, it can act as a catalyst for collectively redefine our relationship to reality. This “strange” design is positioned in relation to other practices more interested in changing reality rather than simply describing or maintaining it. This is a design that believes to achieve change. Designers: today reality needs fantasy to render it desirable.
Oriol Arnedo Casas
www.oriolarnedo.com
[1] Fisher, E. (2010). Contemporary technology discourse and the legitimation of capitalism. European Journal of Social Theory, 13(2), 229–252.
[2] Segal, H. P. (1994). Future imperfect: The mixed blessings of technology in America. Univ of Massachusetts Press.
[3] Duncombe, S. (2007). Dream: Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy. New Press.
[4] Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT press.
