Kubrick’s Apes

[also on The Skirmisher]

The further integration of blogging into the lives of individuals is
fast taking us back four million years ago, right at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s greatest tale.

I have always believed the whole idea behind blogging is simple:
placing anybody in a role that allows them to make sense of something
as faceless as the Internet on a purely personal level.

I’m
seduced to imagine a swarm of humans approaching this giant called the
“Interweb,” poking its underbelly with their little stick/schtick, and
seeing how it reacts.

If it wakes up, if you get its attention,
you have options. You either ride on it and let it take you to places,
or you scoot back to your cave.

The Internet in its present incarnation has become a truly Grand Monolith, which reminds me of the same block of gray in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: Space Odyssey.
In the film, a mysterious monolith appears amid a sleeping group of
apes. The apes, when they wake up, react with the three great things
that would later propel their own evolution:

fear, curiosity, and courage.

The
monolith becomes a point of contention: they stare at it endlessly,
they fight over it, they try so much to make sense of it. It baffles
and annoys them. But it also inspires them. The apes make those excited
grunts that you could only hear these days from somebody like Elizabeth
Ramsey.

And because they cannot deny its existence and they can
do nothing about it, the monolith somehow arouses them to develop what
could be life’s next best creation since the human cerebral cortex: the
human tool.

This part of the film where one of the apes makes a
little tool out of animal bone is one I could not forget: because the
tool, uncannily, is also the world’s first weapon.

It drives
home one of the important points of the film: that the first product of
human ingenuity was not the wheel, not religion, but something
fashioned to defend and destroy.

Which, when you think about it, is also very much like religion.

The
tribe of that ape that invents it, the tribe that had been driven away
from their precious water pond, makes a comeback with the weapon to
slay the fuckers that had driven them out. And there, in a classic “war
over natural resource,” the “advanced” tribe makes its first kill.

Us bloggers are like Kubrick’s
apes; we were all sleeping when it hit us in the 1990s. Some of us
merely touch it and some rearrange their lives around it. And there are
those who spend most of their waking life trying to make it fit into
the grand scheme of things, and somehow, make it into a really good
thing.

How blogging is fast emerging as a powerful form of media works the same as Kubrick’s
prehistoric monolith: we are forced to grapple its possibilities with
the things that make us human. Blogging, and the Internet at large, has
aroused our fear, our curiosity, and our courage. It has filled us with
a certain longing for something that engulfs and devastates—and also
empowers.

These days, we blog about the cute puppy or the cat,
the daughter’s first smile, the drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. We blog about
how we could enlarge our dicks and complain why John Holmes or that guy on Bang Bros had
it so good. We blog about how this girl’s boobs are so stunningly
gorgeous and so large that they have their own political system. We
blog about the cute classmate who never knew our name. We blog about
our little triumphs and our little questions.

We wage our wars
here, we say our “fuck yous” here. And the good thing, whenever a
gaggle of us hit critical mass, the targets of our yearnings eventually
listen.

But blogging isn’t only about the things that excite
your mother; it has also become a balance of sorts. It has become, to
use this blog’s theme, a skirmish of dark and light. Because for every
molecular biologist documenting their find, there’s a pondscum
somewhere preying on the unwary. For every tech-savvy CEO who reaches
out to his company’s direct consumers, there’s an idiot who uses a
frightened blindfolded man as his header image (why does this sound so
familiar?).

Xanga alone currently hosts fifty million bloggers,
and most of them are articulate enough to define both the gaudy,
terrific excess of a meaningless life and the unbearable lightness of
being. And for better or worse, bloggers are driving decision-making
and commerce across the planet.

This emerging monolith has
allowed the individual to give face to an otherwise formless giant. And
like the apes in that 1968 film, we are sinking deeper and deeper in
trying to make sense of it. It has been changing us so quickly. It has
been pushing us out of that door.

Until maybe one day, we’ll find ourselves finally out there, in a place we could no longer return from.

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