THE DIGITAL HORIZON

Mythologic Horizons: Terrestrial

Robert Anton Wilson, in his book The Cosmic Trigger volume 1, observes the relationship between cultural horizons and the contents of mythology. He discusses how in different epochs, the focus of entire civilizations and their cultural production are oriented toward the same horizon line, which throws their culture into perspective with the world around. In the middle ages, for example, the gaze of the average peasant was downward, into the soil in which they dug and planted, and from whence they reaped their harvest. When they told stories that became the folktales we know today, the fairies and gnomes, trolls and wolves came from out of the soil, the heather, or the forest. During the space age, when society's gaze was turned upward towards the cosmos, people imagined UFO’s and aliens coming down to earth, and stories of these supposed encounters proliferated throughout our papers, books, news, and film. And now, during the digital age, in which our gaze is focused inward to the ever expanding grid of cyberspace, our myths are concerned with artificial intelligence, be it a cyberpunk dystopia or a silicon valley cult of the basilisk or singularity.  The monsters in these stories and the mischief they get up to tells us something about the anxieties and struggles of the people of each era, be they physical with the world around them or psychological with themselves. 

The people of Europe in the Middle Ages lived on islands of village life within the wider natural world, and the border between it and their lives was not as distinct as it is now in our urban civilization. Not only were they subject to the climate cycles of nature, they often had to go out into the wilderness to chop wood, clear farmland, or hunt game, putting them in contact with wild beasts who also sometimes came into their domain to hunt livestock. In addition, infant and maternal mortality were serious concerns, while disease, sickness, and crop failures were an ever-looming threat.  As a result, their mythology depicted characters entering the wilderness and coming into conflict with creatures there, antagonists whom they had to overcome, to defeat in combat or outsmart and elude. In other stories, these creatures would steal babies for ransom and eat, or attempt to eat, their children, or do things like spoil crops and steal the harvest when displeased. 

One possible interpretation might be that this represents society overcoming nature and carving out a place for itself within the wilderness. Beowulf, Hansel and Gretel, and Little Red Riding Hood all depict protagonists or “heroes” who had to go into the wilderness for one reason or another and defeat or trick a monster to make it back into the arms of society, the monster vanquished and life able to go on as before. Another way to look at it might be that these stories are bargaining, even pleading with nature spirits to allow us to keep our children or give us a bountiful harvest. Rumplestiltskin is probably the most popular of this motif, in which a woman must first pay and then trick a goblin in exchange for her own children. Irish folklore is full of characters who succumb to the evil wiles of fairies living in the brush who, if not honored or paid homage in the correct way, steal babies and crops alike. These stories depict the everyday concerns of the people contemporary to the story, and serve perhaps as inspiration to see through the hardships nature visits on peasant life or, when the outcome was tragic (as it often is in these fairytales), it serves as a collective grief mechanism for the culture to process as a whole, relegating it to the experience of the story so that they can carry out the tasks of daily life in the face of these constant worries. Ultimately, these shared myths universalize the human experience and create a collective cultural referent that psychically binds society together. 

As Joseph Campbell tells us however, there is a psychological interpretation to these stories, and the dark forest may represent the unconscious, or the collective unconscious, and besting the foes may represent overcoming anxiety about the unknown, be it the world, the psyche, or the future. With this psychological perspective, we may have a better understanding of the complexity of mythology. Certainly the wolf motif in some of these stories reflects the fear of actual wolves that stalked the dark forest, and these beasts take on human characteristics to express living with the knowledge that these creatures inhabit and share the very same environment of the people themselves. But there must be a different accounting for the mythological beasts and creatures that populate these stories, like the monster Grendel and his mother, or the various gnomes and fairies that play tricks on people, stealing their infants and spoiling their crops when they are displeased. Surely not everyone who lived at these times believed these creatures actually lived in the hedgerow, under the nearby hill, or slept in a drop of dew. 

What these creatures might be, rather, is a personification of a much less articulated collective anxiety than that imparted by predators that stalked their sheep or inclement weather that threatened their crops. In premodern times, the survival of a baby or a mother through childbirth was in serious question, as was surviving the winter, in fact the survival of an entire village was ensured only in the face of what to us seems like crushing adversity, for the reasons articulated above and many others. But for a preliterate culture, the expression of these anxieties may not come out as well articulated fears of specific disasters, but rather general fears manifested in a story with an otherworldly monster. And the defeat of or escape from these monsters may have been a way to sublimate this unarticulated dread into inspiration to go on in the face not only of impending difficulty, but the actual loss of a mother or infant. These stories are a collective processing of the hardship of daily life, and despite one individual's loss, they reassure us that society as a whole will continue to perpetuate itself in the face of these challenges.

In later societies, literate and technological like our own, similar things manifest themselves in our stories, however our anxieties are not the same as those of the people of the past. Yet still our specific concerns are rarely enunciated, for a monstrous manifestation of our emotions translates more easily to a wider audience. A monster personifying terror can take on any number of meanings to any number of people, though they still represent some sort of collective anxiety shared by all, regardelss of disparate individual interpretations. If a myth of the past represented the anxiety of living at the mercy of nature, some modern myths may instead express the anxiety of living in a way antithetical to nature. Our scientific method and the medical, agricultural, and transportation technology it birthed has overcome the majority of the problems plaguing us from the natural world: disease, death in childbirth, agricultural dearth, and physical isolation. However, some sense of impending doom or unavoidable catastrophe remains in our mythology. So while pre-modern myths may express anxiety about the present, technological myths express anxiety about the future.

Perhaps the perennial myth of the West is the Faust myth, in which the protagonist exchanges his eternal soul for ultimate knowledge. While ultimate knowledge brings ultimate power, the pact with mephistopheles always looms in his future: Faust will have his power, but the devil is always waiting to claim his soul. As is so often the case with the stories we consider, the “good guy” always wins in the end, but just barely (apparently in the original myth Faust goes to hell). Still, this imminent sense of having to eventually pay an ultimate price to nature has never left our mythology. Perhaps it’s a holdover from an earlier time wherein, as we’ve seen, nature exacted her price in the here and now. Even in Faust, he holds back the sea to build a palace where none should be, which implies the dam will some-day break and drown his palace. The struggle to exist opposed to or outside nature is a constant source of anxiety in man, and while we continue to build our civilization that bends nature to our will and cows it under our might, we use mythology to offset a looming sense of dread that it all may go horribly wrong. However, this power is so mighty which we wield over nature, in time our mythology instead shifted from nature eventually winning out against us to the technology itself taking control of us and our world. 

Cosmic

Returning to Wilson, he says that when we shifted our gaze to the horizon, and conquered distance first with flight and then with space travel, we imagined aliens coming from out of the sky to invade, abduct, and conquer us. In other words, as our technological horizon shifted from agriculture to flight, or from the soil to the sky, our mythological horizon shifted from forest creatures to space aliens. And for a time, science fiction, the mythology of the technological age, depicted invasions of the planet by aliens from far off galaxies and even battles in space with foreign creatures as we vied with them for dominance of the cosmos. Some of these stories, like the Foundation novels, Dune, and Star Wars, expressed our optimism for the space age, and divine heroes rose to the challenges and ushered human civilization into the future and we as a species perpetuated ourselves through the ages. But other stories were not so optimistic. 

Lovecraft presaged space age science fiction with his stories of ancient, long slumbering Gods and aliens who awake and leave their undersea lairs or invade from outer space, insidiously beginning to encroach upon the human hegemony over the planet. In The Call of Cthulhu and At The Mountains of Madness, human exploration of the vast and final reaches of the planet awakens a long forgotten God who surely threatens our very existence as a species. As Lovecraft himself says, it is a blessing that we cannot correlate the contents of our minds - we cannot know all there is to know, lest we go mad. Not just our curiosity, but our insatiable need to conquer space, in these stories, leads to an encounter with a power greater than ourselves that we are defenseless against. Other stories, like The Doom That Came to Sarnath and even the myth within the myth of At The Mountains of Madness tell of extinct cultures that met their doom, a fate we may be barreling towards ourselves. And with the catastrophe of World War 2 and the awful power of the atom bomb, Lovecraft may be seen as a prophet for the mutually assured destruction our technology was sending us to. Though the threat of atomic annihilation never came to fruition, with global warming humanity is still telling itself an apocalyptic tale wrought by the hand of its technological imprudence. 

While those stories warn of impending demise brought about by our desire to know and discover more, to use our measuring and drilling and travel technology to expose every nook and cranny of the globe, other Lovecraft stories tell of the coming of a threat from the cosmos, the very place we were next looking to probe our consciousness into. The Whisperer in Darkness and The Color Out of Space both tell of mysterious life forms that come to earth from the cosmos to slowly overtake humanity and “possess” them or engulf them, negating our will and our very existence and to replace us with themselves as the dominant life form on the planet, or at least bend our will to do their bidding and turning us into their puppets. Lovecraft's stories come at a time of transition, when the age of exploration was coming to an end, with the attainment of both poles, exploration of Antarctica, and the eventual summit of Mt Everest, and the Space Age was just getting started, with historical advances in physics and the mapping of the cosmos. 

As our societal gaze shifted up to the heavens, so too did the monsters, in Lovecraft and elsewhere, begin to shift from terrestrial based life-forms like those previously discussed, that come from out of the dark, to unrecognizable monstrosities resembling no living creature that come from outer space. Consider briefly the monsters of a century of horror that preceded Lovecraft and the space age: werewolves, the undead, vampires, molemen, etc. Creatures that resembled animals or humans in some corrupted form. But with lovecraft we get a shift to wholly unrecognizable life-forms with insectoid and plantlike morphology. It is as if Lovecraft opened pandoras box of mythological monsters, for in the ensuing decades of horror and science fiction we saw myriad strange and fantastical aliens that either loosely resembled biological forms or totally eschewed them. 

Perhaps the quintessential example to all of this is the rash of UFO sightings and alien abductions that were reported once the space age began in full - roughly 1945. These stories resemble the earlier folk tales from the previous age both because they first spread by word of mouth, and they roughly followed the same basic plot points: an other-wordly creature came from beyond the parameters of human civilization and abducted or abused those they came in contact with. But because we were no longer at the mercy of crop failure or infant mortality, the monsters of these stories - aliens - either abused the encountee his or herself, or they plotted against them individually or humanity as a whole in an elaborate scheme to bend human production to their will. The aliens don't just control or abuse individuals in these stories, but they also control the government or are being covered up by the government in some sort of collusion scheme.

What these two sorts of myths have in common is not just that the monsters come from beyond the known world, but that they are involved in the elements of our lives that are beyond our control. We worked with the soil to make a living and the elements schemed against us to render our work futile, but now we work for one of any number of huge bureaucracies and myriad institutions; the schools, the military, departments of labor or transportation, the state or federal government itself, or else huge industrial and commercial entities like insurance companies, hospitals, factories, retail or food chains. All the machinations of running society happen outside our personal experience and we, the “folk” who tell these folk tales, have no direct hand in the inner workings of civilization. So first the creatures who operate outside our control come from the sector of the cosmos that is unknown to us - the forest, the ocean, etc - and once the world had been probed and brought to heel by our technology, these agents of control came from the last unknown place left - outer space.

But now the space age has ended. It practically ended in 1970 with the Apollo space mission, the farthest into space any human has ever traveled, but the final nail was put in the coffin in 1991 with the fall of the Berlin wall. As the years went on, society gave our work in space less and less importance until now, it's simply an afterthought. The gaze of our civilization turned inward, to ourselves, and the new obsession is with our own identities. “Identity politics” began to shape all cultural forms that used to, as we discussed earlier, serve as a collective experience for the entire culture, whose focus was oriented, by and large, towards the same material horizon. But just as the focus outward beyond the borders of our nation and even the borders of the planet  was turned inward to ourselves, so too was the mythological horizon shifted from the sky to the internet. The cosmos, as far as our science can approximate its shape, is infinite, while the repeating grid-pattern of the wormhole of cyberspace is *potentially* infinite. In the early phases of the second millennium, our entire culture has reoriented itself toward this new, ever receding horizon, and just as people of the past saw new monsters appear in the distance, so too do we face a new beast, with new implications for our current plight. 

The monster of the digital era is artificial intelligence, and its morphology and characteristics tell us just as much about our current concerns with our identity as monsters of the past told us about the world around us. 

Digital

Our digital culture is not concerned with producing anything or going anywhere. Food production has been outsourced and highly mechanized, and global travel has been reduced to a matter of hours. These were problems or hurdles that our culture had to work out in earlier phases, and while in the past our civilizations poured its energy into accomplishing these things, today they’re barely an afterthought, and these needs can be met with less than a week's salary. Food and travel are now hobbies, mere accouterments to the experience of 21st century life, boutique pastimes showcased on our social media profiles as a mini spectacle for all to enjoy and recreate at will. The struggle to overcome nature, distance, and time has resulted in total human domination of the globe and the former limits placed on human potential by material reality. Now the only struggle is to figure out who we are, as individuals and as a people, in this technological world, and the monsters in the new millennium reflect the anxiety over loss of past identities as well as anxiety about our current identity - or lack thereof. 

These anxieties take the form of both “folk tales” and stories, just like in the past the common people told tales of fairies while the priests and nobles listened to and wrote down the epics of Beowulf and Roland, or as HG Wells, Lovecraft, Asimov, etc wrote stories while the folk recounted tales of alien abduction. Today we have the same literature and film of science fiction, while the people tell each other of the coming AI utopia, the “singularity” and “transhumanism.” Just as fairie and UFO stories were wholeheartedly believed by many, so too are these stories of sentient technology. These stories certainly address the age-old fear of death, with their prophesy of uploading our consciousness to the cloud to exist in perpetuity, but they also address the day to day concerns of the common people, who endlessly discuss and debate them among themselves. The end of work is one, and in many tales the appropriation of production will lead to an era of leisure, totally free from the concerns of labor and scarcity. It will also give humans the ability to overcome any ailments or disease, with nano-bots killing cancer cells and neuro-electronic appendages turning us into veritable cyborgs. Some have even kept a glimmer of the space age alive, speculating that perhaps AI will do the work of mining minerals on asteroids and other planets, returning the earth to an edenic paradise once more.

As time wears on, however, it’s looking less and less like these wonders will ever come to pass, though many insist the technology just isn’t there yet, but will be soon. However, the flip side of this utopian coin is the way AI is depicted in our myths, where we see a much darker vision of humanity's place in the future. Where the transhumanists see liberation from toil, science fiction sees human exile and loss of meaning. The Singularity is supposed to be the moment artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, initiating a positive feedback loop in which AI exponentially increases technological innovation and productive capacity, ushering in an unprecedented era of human flourishing. But where the transhumanists see immortality and freedom, the science fiction writers see slavery, subjugation, and death. Again and again science fiction films with an Artificially Intelligent antagonist depict the technology, rather than liberating humanity, turning on it. In Blade Runner, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, Ex Machina, The Matrix, and many others, humans either succumb to the tricks of AI or wage a desperate battle against it for control of planet earth and human destiny. By examining these myths, we can illuminate the anxiety stalking the digital era, and see it is novel and distinct from any past era. 

Another unique feature of digital age mythology, however, is the relationship between the subject and the monster in digital age stories. As we’ve seen in the past, the monsters of fairy and UFO stories were personifications of distributed, all encompassing forces like “nature,” “death,” or “institutions,” or a composite of “The Other.” Consider for example the fact that many alien abduction stories involve rape and abuse at the hands of the aliens, or that a story like Hansel and Gretel has both a “wicked” step mother and an evil old crone. Artificial Intelligence and cyborgs however, do not amalgamate “bad people” into a composite monster like the child abuser Freddy Krueger, or serve the role that zombies might, providing a backdrop of danger upon which inter-human conflict can play out. No, artificial intelligence represents both a personification of a distributed, all-encompassing force - this time “technology” - but *also* serves as a mirror image of ourselves, showing us either our current condition or our future selves in the digital era. 

A digital paradigm shift is underway, and as our society reorients itself around the new medium, the old horizon fades away like the old media, and the subject and its qualities must be redefined. As with other epochs, this process was foretold and chronicled by the current mythology.

We Scorched the Sky

When a culture turns its focus to one horizon, it necessarily turns away from another, and we see that prior horizon disappear as it fades into the distance. The disappearance of the old horizon is depicted in several digital age myths with AI antagonists. In “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” for example, the world is enveloped in a perpetual fog, fallout dust from a past war that reduced the world to rubble and sent most humans “off-world.” Those who remain literally cannot see the horizon, for it is obscured by the consequences of man's technological action. And Dekkard, the protagonist of the book and the film adaptation Blade Runner, is concerned not only with neutralizing the invading threat that emerges from this obscured horizon, but also with his own humanity or identity as a human. The subject, the reader or viewer, is left to debate and ponder whether or not Dekkard was actually a human or an AI the whole time.

Neuromancer opens with the line “the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel.” Again we see a story concerned with artificial intelligence depicting the sky as gray and obscured, the horizon obfuscated and the focus of the narrative now on cyberspace. We can no longer peer into the distant heavens and see the layered twinkling stars, but we can look into the ever repeating pattern of binary code as it gives rise to a new realm within which human endeavors will play out. Our consciousness, and that of the protagonist Case, is being projected inward now. The author William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” with this novel, a technological appropriation of the concept of the infinite space that we’ve turned away from. Here we see the antagonist as a powerful entity emerging in the digital realm, the very place humanity is beginning to focus its attention. AI is now replacing the monsters of the forest and the sky as those realms are subsumed by encroaching technology and coming into the categories of human epistemology. Cyberspace is the new great unknown with limitless potential which in turn opens up a new category of collective anxiety.

The quintessential depiction of the obscured horizon however, comes in The Matrix, when Neo first escapes the pod and is introduced to the reality of human affairs by Morpheus. Humanity and artificial intelligence wage a war for the supremacy of the real, which results in humans being trapped within the hyperreal, a digital update of Plato's cave of illusion. Morpheus tells Neo that humanity was “united in celebration…as we gave birth to AI.” In the 1990s the “world wide web” and the “information superhighway” were going to improve everyone's lives, and the coming digital age was spoken of as a Utopia not unlike the Space Age was in exhibits at Epcot center or TV shows like the Jettsons and Star Trek. But soon enough, according to Morpheus, a war broke out and it was humanity who “scorched the sky” in the interest of cutting sentient technology off from its solar powersource. This is the literal negation of the space age horizon, humanity now purposefully obfuscating the previous horizon around which we were “united” to turn every bit of human capital and cultural energy towards cyberspace. The war with AI seen here and in films like The Terminator depict the new collective anxiety about traversing the unknown, however one glaring distinction must be made about these digital age myths and the previous mythological epochs. While in the terrestrial and space age we used our technology to explore the unknown, in the digital age we used our technology to create the unknown, and it is therefore reasonable to understand the monster of this unknown - AI - as more of a reflection of ourselves in this unknown than any other monster before. 

The Digital Dromosphere

As we head towards the new digital horizon, the obfuscation of the old one can be thought of as its protraction backward, fading into the distance until it’s disappeared. Paul Virillio calls this other horizon the “Negative Horizon,” for it is behind us now, and the culture that grew up around it has been negated. As the horizon fades from view, so too does an old mode of being. Virilio’s book is subtitled “the politics of speed,” and in it he lays out his concept of “dromology,” the study of speed in history. The world in the 20th century, as McLuhan tells us, is perpetually circumnavigated by fast moving technology, obliterating the constraints of distance. It’s encased in, or “enframed by,” technology, turning Martin Hedieggers conceptual theory of technology into a literal reality. The sum total of all the freight trucks, barges, passenger jets, high speed trains, and satellites in orbit constantly traversing the globe over land, sea, air, and space, is called the “dromosphere.” The problem of space has been overcome, the distant horizon has been grasped, and the West has now circled back around on its starting place to find it’s left itself far behind. Now that there's nowhere left to go physically, the culture is oriented around overcoming conceptual spaces using digital technology. And one of those conceptual spaces is the human ego itself.

Virillio points out that the same fiber-optic technology used to place cameras on satellites and space rovers is also used on endoscopes to perform medical tests and procedures. These cameras were invented to transmit images of distant regions of the cosmos back to the humans on planet earth to expand the knowledge and utilization of space, but now they’re being used to project our vision inward into the human body, allowing medical doctors to diagnose and treat human ailments. We’re no longer concerned with the conquest of physical space, but the inner space of the human subject. Consider the movie of the same name, “Inner Space,” which is about exactly this: a naval aviator in a space pod is shrunken down and injected into a human body, exploring it like the outer reaches of the sky. The subject into whom he’s injected is a hypochondriac: someone obsessed with the fine details and inner workings of his own body, always anxious that it will soon break down - the Faustian anxiety of nature’s eventual reclamation of the planet transposed onto the individual's inevitable demise. Virillio’s book and this film were released around the same time in the mid 80’s, and serve as portents for the eventual shift of Western priorities from the televisual to the digital age, or from the space to the internet age. The transition between these ages, remember, is the same period of time (roughly 1991-2010) in which the end of the world was a theme in many Hollywood blockbusters. America suffered cultural hypochondriasis while it watched the analog world die and the digital world rise, releasing film after film of world-ending calamities like Independence Day, Armageddon, Sunshine, I am Legend, The Book of Eli, and 2012, to name only a few.

The digital age comes in the wake of this cultural collapse, and though the old Western ego identity has faded or become obscured like the sky in The Matrix, a new one has not quite coalesced yet. While the collective anxiety of a collapsing culture is expressed in these apocalyptic movies, the collective loss of the ego is expressed in the stories featuring AI characters. Just as the concern has reoriented to the ineffable “space” of identity and the human subject, so too has the focus of the economy beyond our borders gone from terrestrial territory and clearly delineated national borders to amorphous “trade zones.” As Virillio points out, speed not only negates horizons but dissolves borders. If our space age tech allows us to transport goods over vast distances cheaper than it would be to manufacture them at home, digital age technology diffuses across the previously impermeable membranes of national borders, globalizing the economy on a previously impossible scale. Likewise, it permeates human consciousness and dissolves the borders between minds and personalities, flooding the human subject with the subjectivity of all users of the internet, exposing the subject to a potentially limitless number of thoughts from an incalculable number of people. The thoughts and ideas of numerous people pass through our minds every day like pipelines and freight trucks and cargo ships coming in and out of port and going back and forth across national borders on a constant basis. Technology has encircled the globe and engulfed terrestrial space, bringing the entire world within this dromosphere, obliterating not only national trade boundaries, but individual ego boundaries. 

Digital Faciality 

The internet is simply the latest addition to the already existing dromosphere, literally encircling the globe with the same fiber optic technology used on the space satellites and the medical endoscopes, superseding the previous technology in speed and efficiency by completely negating the need for travel to conduct business and communication. The physical labor of running the economy has now been redirected into the intellectual labor of running the internet, and we can chronicle the shifting cultural horizons from the land to the sky to the internet as a vast reorientation of the societal gaze. But these shifts in gaze take time, and perhaps currently we are living in the interregnum phase in which humanity is still in the process of reorientation and has not quite yet fixed itself on anything or, to put it another way, the paradigm shift is underway but we are not in the new paradigm yet. For this reason the current cultural focus has been on determining identity. 

Society focused its collective effort once on building cathedrals to venerate the highest deities of its contemporary cosmology during the terrestrial age of myth, and then the collective effort shifted to exploring first the globe and then space, thereby expanding human cosmology, and now the work of building a cosmology has been completed, and the cultural shift has been figuring out who we are within this cosmology. As such, all human subjects are now becoming the focus of grand categorization like that once done in the past. First the work of the high priests was to illustrate and catalog the hierarchy of beings with the Chritian cosmology, from God and Christ down through the saints, humans, and other life forms. Then it became the job of scientists and explorers like Charles Darwin or Lewis and Clark to observe, sketch and categorize all living things as the globe was explored. Lewis and Clark sent sketches back east to Thomas Jefferson, who poured over them to learn of the new territories coming under the auspices of the american empire under manifest destiny, while Darwin used his study of life forms to conduct a grand theory of evolution for *all life*.

Facial recognition technology can be thought of as a similar process, a way to observe and categorize all human figures and bring it into the realm of digital epistemology, encompass the human race within the digital dromosphere and categorize and track us like we once did with all beings with the hierarchy of the heavens and the planet. Think of the title of one of the biggest social media companies on the planet, “face” book; the faces of all human users being compressed into a digital “book” like an encyclopedia of categorization. It is of course from this book that facial recognition technology compares visages captured on screen to find the identity of the subject in question. It’s not quite clear to what extent this technology is being utilized, but this is certainly its potential use-value. This engulfment of the human subject into the cyber-cosmology is the experience of the protagonist in digital age science fiction being encased in the cyber-realm of the AI antagonists. Think of all the profile pics on all social media as each individual in their matrix pod from whence the machines extract their vitality to run its operations, or the victim in Ex Machina trapped in the digital laboratory while the AI character roams freely through the material world. 

This invasion of the real by AI in science fiction chronicles the loss of human autonomy in the world while machines and artificial intelligence run civilization, and the compressing of the human visage into digital books chronicles the disappearance of the subject from the digital affairs of running the world. And this is exactly what Virilio predicted, that as speed increases, not only do cultural horizons disappear, but so too does the human subject. Once the human face is mapped by the digital and relocated to cyberspace, what remains is the placid, featureless stare of the machine, perfectly embodied by the T1000, Agent Smith, and Ava in Terminator 2, The Matrix and Ex Machina, or the grim skeletal figures of the T-800 Terminators, stripped of all human features and even of any potential for emotion or affect. These machines, all of them, are concerned with replacing and eliminating us, and have become the focus of the collective anxiety in the digital age while we are subsumed more and more by cyber “space.” This experience, this reorientation to the internet as the medium of exchange for the human race, can be likened to being locked in a digital prison, and by tracing the trajectory of the conflict between humanity and AI in the stories mentioned here and elsewhere, we can get a better picture of the disappearance of the human in the digital world and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence as the digital golem threatening our very Being.