Talking Shit About a Pretty Sunset

In Before Midnight, the third part of the Before-trilogy, Jesse and Celine are sat on a terrace in Greece watching the sun go down. Celine feels the need to accompany the moment with live commentary. Still there… still there… still there… gone, she says, staring at the horizon.

The sunset is one of the most universally loved phenomena. Everybody likes a good sunset. Still, I often find it hard to enjoy it. The fleetingness of the moment, and the very knowledge that I am supposed to find this beautiful, make me very aware of the moment. Its ephemeral quality might be the most important one, a sunset is a symphony that is always changing, never to be captured. But ultimately it is just what we make of it, what weight we attach to it: all it really is is a changing of the light, panoplied before us.

Author Don DeLillo is obsessed with sunsets. In the nature/nurture dichotomy, he seems to come down on the side of nurture when it comes to sunsets. He seems to continually grapple with it, and takes it as a symbol of our conscious search for happiness. It is a much more modern invention than we might think that everyone on this planet is entitled to a little happiness. And it might just be that real happiness can only be found in the unconscious, that the moment you start wondering whether you are happy, you have lost it already.

They discussed the sunset awhile, sitting on the desk with junk food and drinks. It was better than the previous day's sunset but lacked the faint mauve tones, according to Ethan, of the day before yesterday. They went inside and ate dinner, slowly, an uncoordinated effort. Jack complained that they were talking about the food while eating it, that they talked about sunsets while lookiing at them, so on, so forth.

This is from the novel Players, written in 1977. That urge to quantify things, to put them into perspective by comparison, seems to always loom over us. Some people keep proclaiming every new thing they do or experience as the best. "This is the best food I ever ate," or "I've never heard something so beautiful," or so on. At least there is excitement there. Some are more honest with themselves, and go in a detailed analysis, breaking it all down in parts until it falls apart. There is an old philosophical paradox called the Ship of Theseus. The paradox is whether an object that has all its component parts replaced is still essentially the same object. Perhaps that, if anything, is how to quantify beauty. The beauty is in the invisible marrow of life, in a sum being more than its parts, a current of undefinables running along the infinite lines of the unmappable. If you replace every component with a copy of itself and the end result is not still essentially the same, then there might have been beauty in it to begin with. Alas, you'll never get that beauty back.

Eight years later, sunsets played an important part in another Don DeLillo novel, White Noise. Here again, he ascerts how it is impossible to say why a sunset is so breathtaking.

Early that evening I drove Babette to her class in posture. We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.

"We're not at the edge of the ocean or desert. We ought to have timid winter sunsets. But look at the blazing sky. It's so beautiful and dramatic. Sunsets used to last five minutes. Now they last an hour."

"Why is that?"

"Why is that?" she said.

White Noise is about the mediation of the world and trying to discern the real world from the world on television; trying and failing, for the world on television informs and affects the real world, now more than ever. People come to the small town where Babette and Jack live. They park their cars on the place with the best vista. It becomes something of an event, a you-had-to-be-there moment. Do people come because the sunsets are beautiful or because they are said to be beautiful?

DeLillo seems to finally make up his mind about it in his 2010 novel Point Omega.

He was here, he said, to stop talking. There was no one to talk to but me. He did this sparingly at first and never at sunset. These were not glorious retirement sunsets of stocks and bonds. To Elster sunset was human invention, our perceptual arrangement of light and space into elements of wonder. We looked and wondered. There was a trembling in the air as the unnamed colors and landforms took on definition, a clarity of outline and extent. Maybe it was the age difference between us that made me think he felt something else at last light, a persistent disquiet, uninvented. This would explain the silence.

The old man here might as well be DeLillo himself, in his retirement still overanalyzing everything, but perhaps finally finding something else, something uninvented. This ties in perfectly with the scene from Players: perhaps all it takes it just to stop talking.

Monopoly: A Non-Trivial Pursuit

Not too long ago, I wrote about Google's rise to power. It might be worthwhile to repeat the Rebecca Solnit quote that I included there again:

Imagine that it's 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the US Geological Survey mapping operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the online world that's more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist wrote that Google is trying to take over "the entire fucking Internet" and asked the question of the day: "Who will stop Google?"

I have been worrying about this. Is it really that bad? When the Internet came into fruition, there was a lot of hope that on this new medium things would be different. Everyone would have a voice. What, then, does it signify that all the loudest voices have converged into a few large conglomerates, creating a wall of sound. Within this wall of sound, it is no longer possible to discern the specifics, no longer possible to discern the individual. Fighting with large companies is often like shadowboxing, because you do not know who or where to strike.

It is always worrying when too much power coalesces. Many philosophers have written about this. Even when there is awareness about it, as is the case with the dictatorships of countries like North Korea, it is hard to do anything about it. But when the masses are fooled and lullabied into a slumber, it is particularly dangerous.

Here is, for instance, a data chart mapping all the different companies that produce our products onto their larger parent companies. Suddenly, very little competition remains:

The same thing goes for our media outlets. Our culture is increasingly in the hands of fewer and fewer, who use their far-reaching tentacles to extend copyrights further and further into the future so they can keep their precious little milk cows. Lawrence Lessig, in his book Free Culture, summarizes the state of things in his home country the USA:

• 5 companies control 85 percent of our media sources
• 4 companies control 90 percent of the nation's radio advertising revenues
• 10 companies control half of the nation's newspapers
• 10 film studios receive 99 percent of all film revenue.
• 10 cable companies account for 85 percent of all cable revenue.

Taking this together with the changes in copyright law, Lessig comes to a severe conclusion:

Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now. Not when copyrights were perpetual, for when copyrights were perpetual, they affected only that precise creative work. Not when only publishers had the tools to publish, for the market then was much more diverse. Not when there were only three television networks, for even then, newspapers, film studios, radio stations, and publishers were independent of the networks. Never has copyright protected such a wide range of rights, against as broad a range of actors, for a term that was remotely as long. This form of regulation--a tiny regulation of a tiny part of the creative energy of a nation at the founding--is now a massive regulation of the overall creative process. Law plus technology plus the market now interact to turn this historically benign regulation into the most significant regulation of culture that our free society has known.

A game for the whole family

But let's get back to the Web. Because, more and more, web companies are creating the same illusion of choice as the food and beverage and media outlets above. It has become common practice for the big companies to acquire hot startups and keep them running independently. For instance, when Facebook acquired Instagram, Zuckerberg pressed the point that they were committed to building and growing Instagram independently, as opposed to their — before then — common practice of scooping up hot startups, killing their products, and redeploying their staff on other projects. It is easy to imagine why. Even now, when I am on YouTube, I often forget that this is simply a branch of Google. Though there is some similarity to the layout and color scheme, you will not find a Google logo anywhere on the YouTube page, as opposed to the pages of other popular Google products like Google Maps and Gmail. Yet, at the same time, when I log in to Gmail, I am automatically logged into YouTube as well. The same goes for the very site I am writing this on, Blogger/Blogspot.

Just out of curiosity, I have taken the Top 100 of most popular websites compiled by Alexa, and tried to group them by ownership. I have broken them down below.

Owner	Qty	Domains
Google	22	google.com, youtube.com, blogspot.com, google.co.in, google.de, google.uk, googleusercontent.com, google.fr, google.com.br, google.co.jp, google.com.hk, google.ru, blogger.com, google.it, google.es, google.com.mx, google.ca, blogspot.in, google.com.tr, bp.blogspot.com, google.com.au, google.pl
Amazon	5	amazon.com, imdb.com, amazon.co.jp, amazon.de, amazon.co.uk
eBay	4	ebay.com, paypal.com, ebay.de, ebay.co.uk
Microsoft	4	live.com, bing.com, msn.com, microsoft.com
Alibaba	4	taobao.com, tmall.com, alibaba.com, alipay.com
Yahoo!	4	yahoo.com, yahoo.co.jp, tumblr.com, flickr.com
Facebook	2	facebook.com, instagram.com
Wordpress	2	wordpress.com, wordpress.org
Sina Group	2	sina.com.cn, weibo.com
Baidu	2	baidu.com, hao123.com
Digital Sky	2	mail.ru, odnoklassniki.ru
IAC	2	ask.com, about.com
Tencent	2	qq.com, soso.com
Twitter	2	twitter.com, t.co
AOL	2	huffingtonpost.com, aol.com

That is a landslide victory if ever I saw one. And of course, of course, I know, these are just local versions of Google, mostly, but the fact that google.com is still #1 even with their visitors divided over so many highly visited domains, just goes to show how big they are. Let me also add that this is based on hastily done research by myself, so there might be errors, but it is an indication anyway (there are also many shared interests and stakes and partnerships that I did not even include). Though all these giants might be rivals, they nevertheless share the same interests. They are all based ever-increasingly upon the collection of information, and will often help each other to missing info in something akin to a worldwide game of Go Fish. CEOs move from Yahoo to Google, and from Google to Amazon, and back. It is all really just one big family.

The Real State Secret

This is all fine and dandy, you will say, but who cares? Perhaps, in the wake of PRISM and the Snowden files, people do start caring. Still, a large group of people hold on to the idea that "if you have nothing to hide, you do not need privacy." Though many sci-fi and dystopian books have pointed out the dangers of such an attitude, there is also a more real danger. Adam Curtis, with his usual wit, intelligence and eye for detail, recently wrote a blog post on the subject of spying. He proposed a wholly different question from the one almost all other journalists were occupied with: Do spies actually know what they are doing?

Well, according to Curtis: not really. He focuses on the British MI5, and goes on to debunk much of their alleged successes. He starts out with a story of Iraqi students in London during the Gulf War who became the first Prisoners of War in Britain since WWII. They were incarcerated for no other official reason than "to err on the side of caution". Curtis then goes on to tell a confusing and ridiculous-but-true story on the various internal struggles of the MI5 looking for a Russian spy inside their own organization. Just being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or "rising high in the organization" was enough to make you suspicious. But here is the important point, the inherent problem of spy organizations:

For most of the twentieth century the combination of ineptitude and secrecy created an organisation that retreated more and more into a world of fictional conspiracies in order to disguise it's repeated failures. The question is whether the same is true today?

Disasters like the total intelligence failure over the WMD in Iraq would suggest that nothing much had changed. But the trouble is there is no way we can ever find out. The spies live behind a wall of secrecy and when anyone tries to criticise them, the spies respond by saying that they have prevented attacks and saved us from terrible danger. But they can't show us the evidence because that is secret.

If organizations whose work depends on undisclosed information still are in many senses above the law, the situation is bound to get messy. Data itself is not criminal. An analysis of the data by humans decides whether it is or isn't. If spies in fact do not know what they are doing, there is no more solace to be found in the knowledge of your own innocence. Google probably has more information by now than any spy organization ever had. They are hardly open about what information exactly they collect, or how they use it precisely. I don't know anymore what would be worse: if they know what they are doing, or if they do not.

The pluralization of Protagoras

One hundred and four years ago, in 1909, E.M. Forster released a short novella called The Machine Stops. In this science-fiction parable, Forster predicted the isolations of the digital age with a rather uncanny accuracy. There are parallels in the story to Wikipedia, TED lectures, Facebook, and all sorts of electronic devices. The most salient point of the story is that all our technology, built on the wisdom that was to free us from religious superstition, is yet again enslaving us to a new God, making us more dependent and helpless than ever.

In Forster's dystopia, nearly everyone lives underground, in either of two stations. Everyone is allocated their own room, which provides for their every need at the press of a button. People never leave their room, so they no longer communicate with each other directly. In fact, communicating 'directly' is seen as something unseemly and unbecoming. Instead, they do what most of us in the real world are now doing on a daily basis, and communicate by technology, in something that is akin to what we now call videoconferencing (though the face of the other is only calculated, not actually projected). Forster points out that this is all good and well, but it is no replacement for face-to-face interaction.

She fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people – an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of articial fruit. Something 'good enough' had long since been accepted by our race.

Is it possible that in restructuring our world to run along our electronic wires, we are also constantly settling for something 'good enough'? Whatever emotions we emit, whatever pheromones we expound, are not transmitted. They twist the tongues of the wires. They are of a different dialect, and they do not cross the language barrier. Something is always lost when we translate the analog to the digital. It is an approximation. Even if we humans cannot discern the difference, that does not mean that it does not unconsciously influence us.

Man is the measure

Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man's feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.

In her wonderful book Wanderlust, American writer Rebecca Solnit gives us a history of walking. Of walking for pleasure, not just for practical purpose. One of her more interesting ideas is her suspicion that “the mind, like the feet, works at three miles an hour”. When we step in a car, it is like teleportation, we get in at point A and out at point B, and we lose all sense of space. Though everyone could see this when Forster ridiculed it a century ago, when it concerned people living underground and never going out, apparently it is still too obscured a point for most in our present world.

According to Plato, it was Protagoras, a Greek philosopher from before the time of Socrates, who said “man is the measure of all things.” Since we know little of the context in which he uttered those words, it can be interpreted in wildly different ways. Most, however, take it to mean (broadly) that the world or – if you will allow me to be a broken record – reality, originates in the mind.

By linking the mind, as the origin of all things, back to the measuring of space, to transportation, it is likely Forster came to the same conclusions as Solnit. Though 1909 seems a long time ago, it was of course an age on the threshold of the automobile era, with the faint shadows and outlines of the flying machines we now call airplanes already looming above.

These airplanes feature as zeppelin-like airships in the book, and they are one of the few remnants of the old age. No one uses them for pleasure. They are the only means of getting from the one station to the other, but people experience the direct contact they have with other people on that ship as highly uncomfortable. Go on an aeroplane in our age, and you will find this not such an outlandish feeling. Most people are earplugged with music leaking out, or are engaged with their smartphone or laptop. The security instructions are often no longer given by a flesh-and-blood stewardess, but from a recorded 'performance' on the video screens. Stewardesses have now truly become mere 'waitresses in the sky'.

Man is no longer the measure of all things. We plan our cities according to the whims of cars and we would fain believe a machine than our own selves, as the most loyal iTravelers can easily attest to. We all have an unending faith in the power (and the loving grace) of machines. They cannot be wrong, or can they?

Wikipedia is the measure

To many people nowadays, Wikipedia is one of the grand achievements of the digital age. And it is. In a relatively short time, an accumulation of information has been collected that is unrivalled by any before. It is also data of a different nature than any we've had before. Wikipedia is a tremendously useful source of information, as long as we are all aware of this nature. In his book You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier addresses the problems:

Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in exactly the same way and present many of the same problems.

And indeed, The Machine that controls everything in this story, is slowly revered and turned into religion, as, again, our loyal iTravelers can tell us all about. The only physical book that is left in the future of the story is the so-called Book of the Machine that every room comes furnished with. They are mere manuals, but over time they become the holy books of this new religion, they whisper to their readers and comfort them. Along the way, a reprint of the book is ordered, which features on the first page the phrase: “blessed is the Machine.”

Wikipedia was already parodied before it came into existence. The Hitchhiker's Guide in Douglas Adams' eponymous series is a collaborative effort encyclopaedia with entries on all kinds of random subjects. At some point, Arthur Dent helps to change the entry for Earth from “harmless” to “mostly harmless.” The short entry for Earth, especially compared to extremely long essays on niche subjects like Vogon poetry is a good joke that, itself, has parallels to Wikipedia. Some people have even made this into a sport, called wiki-groaning.

There is a series of Greatest Hits records in music that have been inspired by a classic Elvis compilation, called 50,000,000 Elvis fans can't be wrong. Bands like Bon Jovi, White Stripes, The Fall and Soulwax have borrowed this phrase for their own compilation records. Though perhaps not always applied earnestly, it nevertheless speaks of an instinctive trust we have in numbers. This trust can easily be disproved by looking at almost any history book, yet we cannot shake it off. The hive, or the cloud, or the noosphere, that we base our Web 2.0 world on, is also based on this fallacy. Forster had envisioned it all along. In the dystopia, people can give 'lectures' from their home on whatever subject they specialize in, that are then broadcasted to whomever is interested (remind you of something?). One famous lecturer, impelled by the disgust of anything 'direct', preaches on the power of numbers:

First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy. Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendents will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation

seraphically free

from taint of personality,

which will see the French revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.

Maybe, just maybe, the ancient Greeks were wrong – or perhaps, we misunderstood. Maybe, more specifically, we need to say that “men are the measure of all things.” The more, the merrier. That is the mentality of the hive mind: 19,453,568 Wikipedia contributors can't be wrong.

Towards singularity

An interesting example of computers trying to outsmart us occurs when you google the word singularity. As is the norm these days, the first result that comes up is the Wikipedia entry. In this case, though, two Wikis top the list. The first is technological singularity. This is indeed the thing I was looking for. The second is just singularity, which brings you to a so-called disambiguation page, a portal to all the other possible singularities. Do more people generally care about the technological variant than the mathematical concept it was based on? Probably. However, Google is rather silent about its algorithms for search results (though Eli Pariser gave it the old college try). Primarily, I suppose, because they do not want webmasters to manipulate their website just to get higher up in the results. Secondly, Google more than anyone else knows the value of data; this algorithm that defines the quests of so many people, is especially valuable. But there might also be another problem. Perhaps, within the large confines of the Google complex, the specifics of that algorithm are so divided up that no one knows the complete truth anymore.

This last explanation is a cornerstone element of the hive mentality: all together (we k)now. It is almost a modern version of gnosticism, with us all fractions of the same divine light cast off from God, wanting to reunite. And by God I mean The Machine.

No one confessed the machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbour, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished. They had left full directions, it is true, and their successors had each of them mastered a portion of those directions. But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

The technological singularity is defined as an age in which artificial intelligence outstrips our own, and the salient point of it is that because it goes over our heads, no one will know what happens next. Some predict heaven, others hell. If we define our world by this concept, if this is the future we are staring into, then progress truly has come to mean the progress of the Machine.

But is it possible that progress of the Machine correlates with the regress of man? Every new appliance, every app developed, makes live more convenient for us, but they are all crutches to lean on that we never knew we needed. They are the pharmacists who sell us pills to keep their little money machine running, pills that just make us need more pills. We are helpless without our new crutches, without our omniscient glasses, without our electronic insoles. We used to laugh at the stupidity of the Microsoft Office paperclip. If a future Machine would stop, we might then even be left wanting for this also-ran wisdom of the dancing paperclip.

She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her – it did kill many thousands of people outright. Ever since her birth she had been surrounded by the steady hum. It was to the ear what artificial air was to the lungs, and agonizing pains shot across her head.

The point being, that technological advancement is not always advancement in general. Just like Wikipedia does for singularity, we should start disambiguating between the two again. Progress should not mean the progress of the machine, nor even, I would venture, solely the progress of mankind. It should be the progress of harmony, of happiness, of the world at large. Otherwise, with our current tunnel vision, we might soon be living underground as well.

E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops is in the public domain. You can read it here or Google it yourself and see what comes up for you.

The Press Conference

Half an hour before the event, two journalists are already idling about in front of the glass panels of the large building. They are not yet allowed in. Both of them are smoking cigarettes through the little gap between scarf and hat. I greet them in half-recognition, then, to truly blend in, fiddle about in my inside pocket for my Pall Malls. After about fifteen minutes, a Man Acting Very Official pushes through the crowd of reporters and tapes a note to the glass. We all crane our necks and push about to see, like adolescents being presented with a list of grades.

The first line of the note says the press conference is canceled. In the rest of it, great care is taken to point out the tentative status of this message. It is too soon, it reads, to make permanent decisions on the matter. Too many uncertainties to clear up first.

A few minutes later the Man Acting Very Official comes walking up again, as determined as the first time, with another note, which he tapes over the first one. This second note confirms the cancellation brought up in the first. Due to unforeseen circumstances, the situation is out of our hands, etc. The second part of the new note announces a second press conference, which, ostensibly, is to deal with any questions regarding the cancellation of the first one. This second event will take place in ten minutes, at the building we are all huddled in front of. By the time we finish reading, the Man Who Acted Very Official has long since vanished.

My colleagues and I all have our own way of dealing with this situation. Some shrug, mumble ‘news is news’, stay put. Others run off clutching their cell phones, calling up a colleague of theirs they consider more suited for this second event. A third group, to which I belong, obediently call their bosses wondering how to deal with the situation. Mine says go ahead, you're here anyway, might as well.

Everything in the press room is carefully arranged. As we reporters enter, we are asked after employer and function, and then guided into carefully mapped out sections. I am in the magazine-section, something my fellow magazine writers do not appreciate. After all, I am merely an internet blogger and everyone knows that does not count as real journalism.

Once everyone is seated and organized, the speakers enter, exuding the same solemnity that the Man Acting Very Official did. After the required niceties, the middle speaker - the prime spokesman of the company – makes to talk.

“First of all, I want to thank you all for coming here on such short notice. Our sincerest apologies for the manner in which this press conference was announced. As I hope you are well aware, this is not according to our standard procedure, and will have to go down as an unfortunate exception.”

“Now, to the matter at hand, for which you are all here. For today, a press conference was planned discussing the proceedings of an inquiry into best marketing practices. Unfortunately, as you have learned, this conference had to be canceled due to circumstances well out of our locus of control. There is, as of yet, no new date for the conference, but I can tell you that right now the conference’s official status is postponed, not canceled.”

He leaves it up to the ensuing silence to add weight to his words. “There will be time for questions now,” he adds finally.

Murmurs go through the audience, everyone looks around nervously. Finally, a man in the newspaper section stands up. “What circumstances caused the cancellation of the conference,” he wants to know.

“First of all,” the spokesman counters, “let me remind you that as of now the official status is postponed, not cancelled.” He seems extremely pleased with this remark. “As for the consequences, that is a matter of little concern.”

“Not to a man in my profession,” the newspaperman says, “we have an obligation to be as complete as possible when we collect the facts.”

“As you will, sir. The conference has been postponed because it was brought to our attention that rumors of its cancellation were a trending topic on the Internet. Since we have a policy of extreme care, any rumors compromising the conference are met with immediate action. We do not want to risk the possibility, however small, that the rumors are founded and we turn up unprepared.”

The newspaperman is aghast with this reply for a second and a radio journalist takes this opportunity to jump in. “Our team did some quick research,” he says, not being able to smother the triumphant hint in his voice foreboding what's to come, “and we came across these Internet rumors too. It turns out your company yourself was the one who issued a brief statement of uncertainty regarding the conference, and it was upon this statement that the rumors were based. What do you have to say about this?”

The spokesman laughs, as if it concerns comedian and punchline. “If it is based on a message by ourselves, there is absolutely no reason to doubt it, and that only confirms for me that we have taken the right decision.”

All the journalists around me are scribbling feverishly. A woman next to me stands up and starts asking a question in a tantalizingly slow, drawn-out tempo, as if she is still figuring it all out as she speaks. “Mr. Spokesman,” she starts, “if my information is correct, you were slated to appear at the cancelled press conference.”

“Postponed,” the spokesman corrects.

“Postponed press conference. You have therefore, I assume, your statement for this postponed conference ready and at hand?”

“I do.”

She seems to be searching for the right words, as if what she is about to express is a particularly alien thought. “I would appreciate it if you read out this statement, since that is what I - and I think I speak for most of the people here - came here for in the first place.”

The spokesman looks perplexed. “Why would you come to this conference to hear me read out a statement from another press conference? Pardon my saying so, madam, but that is not according to protocol.”

Here, the organizer of the conference butts in and sternly says: “Please, from now on, no more questions regarding the content of the postponed conference. This conference concerns only the news of the postponement.”

Visibly disappointed, the woman sits down. No one else stands up after that, and proceedings are wrapped up.

Back outside, all of us eagerly take to our cigarettes. Colleagues make calls to their headquarters. With absolute precision, they summarize the conference. Meanwhile I have opened up my suitcase and, my laptop half balancing on a ledge of the building's wall, start typing out my report. Some of us, encouraged by the many sudden changes this afternoon, linger after their work is done, hoping the Man Who Acted Very Official comes by again with a scoop.

Me, though, my article finished, I walk away, out of the solid cloud of cigarette smoke we erected in front of the building.

Realer than the Real

Being 'real' is big business these days. But is there anything undisputedly real, undeniably authentic? Or are these just subjective words, big words, we like to throw around? The real, the genuine, the authentic is often defined as proven to be original, not derivative of, not fake, etc. But language is fickle. For instance, talking about authentic Mexican food just signifies it was made in the traditional way with the traditional recipe. Shift this interpretation to art, however, and you get something else. An authentic Rembrandt is not just such a painting made in the traditional way with traditional paintbrushes. In fact, the word authentic is actually added here to denote the inverse, to indicate that this is not a copy made under the right circumstances, but the original.

Sometimes the original can feel like the copy. For many young kids growing up, the history of pop music for instance, extends itself backwards from the present. We get into Gang of Four thanks to Bloc Party, or listen to Crosby, Stills & Nash as a shadow cast by Fleet Foxes. For us, Editors was simply a rip-off of Interpol, not of late 70s post-punk. For us, Madonna's American Pie was the original and Don McLean was the copy and, for us, Ray Charles' I Got a Woman was a curious precursor to Kanye West.

In this way, too, a carbon copy for us young kids is first and foremost a way to allow some third party to eavesdrop on our e-mail conversations. It is of course named after the thin carbon papers that we used to attach to our paper in order to write out an 'original' and a 'copy' at the same time. However, when this process was first invented, by Ralph Wedgwood in 1806, the process was inverse. The sturdy, normal paper would be at the bottom, and a piece of tissue paper would be above it and you would write on that. Despite the fact that you were writing, physically speaking, more directly on the tissue paper than the regular one, the former would remain the 'copy' and the latter the 'original'. The copy might be more 'real' here.

When is a song real and authentic? Most would point to the original version by the original recording artist, though this often includes artists who did not even write the song themselves. It could be argued that they at least laid the first blueprint, but most of these songs would have to be at least hummed or played in a stripped version to the original recording artist in order for them to further interpret from there. We no longer live in an age that allows for the mathematical abstraction of sheet music. Everything is but a chain of human interaction, an omnipresent butterfly effect.

Finally, what is the real thing in an intangle, electronic world? Which version of the e-book is the most real? There is no rough manuscript, no notes chalked up in the margins. If the modern writer starts out on the computer and ends on the computer, he leaves no artifacts behind. It is a democracy of origin, each version as authentic and inauthentic as the next.

A Certified Copy

All of this and more is what Copie Conforme, the 2010 movie by director Abbas Kiarostami, concerns itself with. It is almost too clever for its own good. It stars an English writer who writes a book, in English, about a theory of the real and the fake, a book called Certified Copy. The idea comes to him as he walks around in Italy. He brings it back to England, writes it and releases it. It doesn't stir up much in its homeland but it does get translated to Italian and for some reason it is a huge success there. So he returns to Tuscany, to the place where it all began, to talk about it – in English. Now where do we go to locate the 'real', the original of the book: England or Italy? Hard to tell, both could raise valid arguments.

The writer, in his theories, points out that even the undeniable real thing, say Michelangelo's David, is just a copy of the real original, the model it was inspired on. On this note Umberto Eco, in his essay Travels in Hyperreality, provides many humorous examples. The one that springs to mind is the museum somewhere in California who had crafted a copy of the Venus de Milo, except with arms, claiming that they did research after the original Venus model, and lo and behold, she had arms. The museum thereupon claimed this sculpture to be even more real (!) than the one in the Loeuvre. Even more real than the real (and if you've ever wondered why realer sounds weird while taller sounds fine, that is because real should not be quantative; the fact that we often talk about more real now is a sign that the word is changing in meaning).

The other protagonist of Copie Conforme, a woman desperately clinging to a husband that is long gone and was forever absent, is intrigued by this theory. She meets the writer and they go to walk around some beautiful Tuscan village, exchanging views. In a curious turn of events, a roleplaying game starts: the woman takes the writer for her husband, and he plays along. Just some innocent fun, you might think, until the writer starts referring to past events he cannot possibly know about, and both of them obstinately refuse to break character while so many reasons pass by to do so. Are they still the same characters as at the start? Or are we being pointed out that they, in fact, are fallible, that is to say fake, because they are actors? The writer's godlike omnipotence, knowing things he cannot know, is a clear breaking of the fourth wall. It is an acknowledgement that he is not really, in fact, the fictional writer he is playing.

All that was once directly lived…

Actors can do that because, even though we all take part in a wilful suspension of disbelief, we, ultimately, know they are actors. It is no secret. What is more clandestine is that most public figures similarly function as actors. Guy Debord gives an excellent example in his prescient 1967 text Society of the Spectacle:

Kennedy the orator survived himself, so to speak, and even delivered his own funeral oration, in the sense that Theodore Sorenson still wrote speeches for Kennedy's successor in the very style that had done so much to create the dead man's persona.

Debord's brilliant theory of the spectacle can be easily moulded to fit our subject: not just athletic events, tv shows and theatre productions are spectacle, the whole world is. Replace the word spectacle by movie and you might just see what Shakespeare was on about when he said that all the world's a stage.

We could speculate for ages about this, but it seems the kind of subject that only gets more confusing as you expound, as you try to figure it out. Perhaps we should follow the advice in the original title of the book the writer presents in the film: Forget the original, just get a good copy.