In this fantasy, dreams do not stem from some internal reality. Instead they are seen as free floating symbols, a simulacrum, standing for nothing but themselves. The sleeping protagonist in the photo still experiences a dream in the form of visual signs, but in this case these are external signs imported from without. If computers and the unconscious, network technology and mind, are essentially one and the same thing—computational hardware that produces informational software—what difference does it make where dreams come from? If both are information processing machines, what difference does it make what the source of one’s dreams is? In other words, the digital discourse cannot define a qualitative, substantive difference between the dreams produced by human unconsciousness and those managed by the “Dreammachine.” In fact, the only difference becomes quantitative: which of these two informational processing machines does it better? As the Wired fantasy clearly shows, on this leveled playing field the computer is superior to the human mind in allowing more control over the spectacle and the emotions it evokes and the control over dream scenarios, protagonists, and events. It renders dreams a truly interactive experience.
In this fantasy the external domain of network technology, or cyberspace, penetrates humans’ most intimate and personal spaces through information. (In this context it seems significant that the subject matter of the protagonist’s dream is clearly sexual. Given that in the modernist Freudian discourse sexual content predominates the unconscious, this makes the statement in the artwork doubly poignant: rather than seeing sex as a foundational motor of human behavior, and hence as a key to self-understanding, sex in the artwork is construed as a spectacle, a tool of satisfaction, and a commodity for consumption). In the digital discourse, cyberspace is seen not as an external entity to the human self but as constitutive of it, specifically, because of its capacity to augment experiences. Network technology helps construct or produce these experiences—and in turn, construct the human self—in ways that offer more control and interactivity and are therefore more empowering. No longer slaves of their Freudian Ids, humans are now promised technological mastery over their unconscious. The penetration of network technology into our innermost spaces is therefore welcome with open arms.
As this occurs, two corollaries follow, uncovering other aspects of the digital discourse on the new network human. As the dichotomy between internal and external is dismantled, dreams become prepackaged, standardized, and commodified just like movies and video games. One can therefore buy a dream, just as the protagonist in the artwork chose to purchase a “romantic thriller.” The second corollary is the rationalization of sleep (and dream) time. One of the data discs laying around the side table in the artwork is titled “Learn Farsi in 7 Nights” (Kaplan 2005). If dreams can be reconstrued as the internal processing of (external) information, one might as well process other forms of information. Sleeping hours, the scene suggests, can be used not only for entertainment but also for more industrious tasks, such as learning a foreign language. To recall a theme developed in Chapter 4, the blurring of the distinction between work time and leisure time is here even more complete and intimate; through the penetrating capabilities of network technology, even sleep time can be instrumentalized and rationalized; even the unconscious can be rendered a space of production.
Network Human
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