Wallace Shawn, in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981):
“In the Middle Ages, before the arrival of scientific thinking as we know it today, well, people could believe anything. Anything could be true. The statue of the Virgin Mary could speak or bleed or whatever it was. But the wonderful thing that happened was that then in the development of science in the western world, certain things did come slowly to be known and understood.”The current occupant’s social-media post touting the arrival of med beds, magical beds that cure disease and regrow missing body parts, made me think of this passage. Our culture is in many ways back the Middle Ages. (Flash: A med bed is keeping JFK alive.)
The current occupant’s post has been removed. But you can still view its AI-generated faux-news story here. It features AI versions of Lara Trump and the current occupant himself, which raises the bizarre possibility that the real-world occupant can’t tell the difference between himself and a digital clone — and that he doesn’t know what he’s said or not said. It wouldn’t be surprising though if he were unable to distinguish an AI-Lara Trump from the real thing. Also not surprising that he spends time looking at looney-tunes AI slop.
So far there’s no mention of the med-bed post in The Guardian, The New York Times, or The Washington Post. In a different climate, the story of this deleted post would be everywhere: “New questions today about mental acuity after,” &c.
Related reading
All OCA mental acuity posts (Pinboard)
comments: 6
Maybe they are thinking of the Jodie Foster, Matt Damon sci-fi movie "Elysium," 2013, where some of the unwashed masses try to escape up to the symbolically named space habitat for the upper class, and then run to use the med bed to very-swiftly cure what ails them, as the police are running to stop them.
...Remember the movie? So bleak. Fair haired Jodie is in charge of the peace officers. I suppose she symbolizes leaders keeping refugee boats away from Australia while other people turn a blind eye, and Americans having AIDS cocktails far from Africa.
Matt works in a factor on earth, in L.A, with smog and dust, where having absentee owners, and no middle class, has produced the predictable effect of less humane working and living conditions.
To me the movie warns that it's important, when writing legislation such as "trickle down" economics,, to maintain America's middle class, not shrink it away to nothing.
Sean, I think you are on to something. I haven’t seen the movie, but there seem to be strong connections. The Wikipedia article about the movie refers to Med-Bays. The current fantasy includes a claim that med beds are the product of alien technology.
The Wikipedia article about med beds (or medbeds) doesn’t mention the movie at all.
Too bad those news sites missed it, but I will tell you who did cover the story: Stephen Colbert!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzM5tOauPZI
Yes. And it was on MSNBC this afternoon, though they treated it as an occasion for amusement rather than alarm. This stuff should never be normalized.
I'm with you on this one, Michael.
Right now the democrats are ineffective at "flooding the zone" (as Steve Bannon put it) but I take heart in George Clooney saying the Dems would eventually generate another Barak Obama.
If such a candidate comes out of the woods, then I bet he will use your line as his catchphrase: "This stuff should never be normalized."
I think lots of people are saying that, even if our media sources are pretending that everything's normal.
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