“Joe went back to the kitchen, took a dime out of one of his pockets and started the coffee machine with it. So he tried to turn the fridge handle to get a brick of milk. "Ten cents, please," the refrigerator told him. “Ten cents to open my door; and five cents to take the cream. »” - Philip Dick - Ubik, 1969
At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Philip Dick and Luciano Floridi explored, some with science fiction and some with philosophy, that increasingly thin line that separates the real world from digital life.
In particular, Luciano Floridi, professor of Information Ethics at the University of Oxford, coined the neologism onlife to describe the advent of an era in which everyday life will merge with the infosphere of communication. Digital systems will become an extension of our body, our consciousness will connect with the flow of information in the digital world, decreeing a real fusion between real and digital. According to Floridi himself, in the near future it will make no sense to ask whether you are online or offline.
The concept of onlife presented by Floridi appears as a positive consequence of globalization and will allow society to evolve and develop new extraordinary experiences. The only real big problem, according to Floridi, will be represented by the "digital divide": if many can get in touch and benefit from the constant flow of information that is represented by the infosphere, someone else will risk being disconnected from it, becoming a victim of new forms of discrimination that will creep into the furrow that separates "rich and poor in information".
The concept of half-life appears for the first time in one of Philip Dick's most visionary science fiction novels: Ubik. In the novel the author describes the future in which reality and simulation would end up becoming overlapping deficlearly indistinguishable.
Joe Chip, the protagonist of the story, interacts with the appliances which, positioned in the kitchen of his apartment, supply bevleaves and foodstuffs behaving like old payphones.
The coffee machine and the refrigerator interact with him providing their service only in response to payments in coins of a few cents. A disturbing metaphor with which the author clearly anticipates a future in which private property would have given way to an economy capable of providing people with everything necessary for their subsistence, through micro-payments and other forms of subscription.
When we talk about onlife we tend to highlight the most extraordinary and innovative aspects of the new digital revolution. In the eyes of my generation, advantages are the thing that most catches the eye of onlife; just think of how a simple subscription to Spotify now allows people to access a music catalog made up of millions of songs for hundreds of thousands of albums, an experience that until the 90s was in the dreams of all of us music lovers.
The image that Philip Dick gives of the future, which in some ways already corresponds to our present, passes through a less enthusiastic and certainly more critical and disenchanted gaze. Today, in fact, as Dick prophesied, the ownership of technological tools is increasingly supplanted by a service economy that does not neglect to provide the most widespread technological tools by signing a rental contract, sometimes even binding the buyer to the '' purchase of the raw materials necessary for their operation. So not only cars, computers and smartphones, but also the simple coffee machine is often present in our kitchens against a loan for use contract that includes the supply of pods or coffee beans (just like in the kitchen by Joe Chip).
The Internet is the platform on which the intangible services that everyone uses online are born and developed. Streaming services that have replaced satellite and cable TVs. The various Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and even geolocation services, from satellite navigators to the most recent "tags" that help us find the car in the parking lot of the shopping center. Even the video surveillance systems of our homes and the devices for monitoring the health of our loved ones. Each of these tools is associated with a remote service which is in turn connected to a subscription covered by a credit card which guarantees continuity of service.
The dematerialization of property and its replacement with paid instruments is Dick's way of describing the economy of the future with absolute precision, and this many years before the birth of the Internet and modern payment systems.
“She, beautiful and with fair skin; her eyes, on the days they had been opened, had shone a bright blue. This would never happen again; he could talk to her and hear her answer; he could communicate with her ... but he would never see her again with his eyes open. And he would never see her mouth move again. She would never smile again when her arrived. "She In a way she's still with me," she told herself. «The alternative would be nothing.» ”- Philip Dick - Ubik, 1969
In Ubik's novel, Glen Runciter usually visits his long-deceased wife. Her body has been placed inside a cryogenic coffin which keeps her mind alive and gives her a limited ability to communicate with the world. Ella, Glen's wife, is in a condition known as half-life.
Half-life between life and death is a condition of existence in which the person's body is dead but mental functions are kept intact thanks to technology.
A metaphor for the future life, the half-life is a literary construct that seems to anticipate very recent concepts such as the idea that there may be a metaverse where one can transfer one's existence and live forever. In reality it is much more.
In the novel, the half-life does not represent a voluntary escape into the virtual but a kind of benign compulsion for which death must be defeated or at least postponed as much as possible in favor of those who remain, to fill their personal inability to mourn. .
Ella's ability to communicate from her semi-life state can be activated and deactivated at will by her husband, aware that with each "awakening" his wife's mind would approach one step at a time towards the end of her existence.
She has thus become nothing more than a consumer product. Unknowingly Ella exists in her half-life state for the sole purpose of continuing to support her husband unable to separate from her.
The concept of half-life decrees the end of the life-death dichotomy but anticipates the disintegration of other dichotomies closer to us such as analog-digital, real-virtual, online-offline often definite on concepts that did not yet exist in 1969.
For Philip Dick it is not possible to oppose a capitalist society that places man increasingly on the margins of real life and increasingly within an egomaniacal mental context which, under constant stimulation of entertainment services, artificially gratifies and condemns him. to a half-life.
The fact that the Internet did not exist in 1969 and computers had not yet entered the homes of Americans makes us believe that the form of existence we describe with the neologism onlife is not at all the result of technological innovation, the Internet and the birth of the metaverse.
The evolution of the infosphere, its accessibility, the production of increasingly sophisticated and economical mass communication devices are not the real reasons for the transposition of physical life into onlife life. Rather, they are the consequence of economic choices that have shaped the current version of the Internet, capitalistically centered on digital products, on metaverses and on the services that market them.
In an interesting research entitled "Shattered Realities: A Baudrillardian Reading of Philip K. Dick's Ubik" the authors write: "Although the characters are in search of reality and a transcendental meaning that makes them maintain their identity, they cannot achieve what they seek and do not know if they are undergoing the real or a simulation. Thus, they crave to fix reality and their identities through the market. "
In a society made up of people accustomed to dealing with systems of transitory value it is certainly easier to impose models of commodification with which one can do without the ownership of physical instruments. If everything becomes transitory and sometimes precarious in its functioning, certainties are reduced and the world itself in which we live loses its value as a point of reference.
The Internet is not just onlife, the Internet is the engine of the transformation of our existences into half-life as prophesied by Philip Dick and described by him in great detail.
Article of Gianfranco Fedele
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