Tech Noir 106

Jim had talked about doing a Tech Noir themed course many years ago, and now we’re looking to revisit the idea. It feels appropriate to the times. I can’t expect everyone to be an aficionado of the genre though, so I’m thinking about ways to be expansive with it, to offer people more ways to connect. Incorporating cyberpunk is an obvious one. I also want to add Technopoly to bring a philosophical lens to the idea.

And I should probably think through what Tech Noir means to me. I see film noir as a response to a certain place in history. In the preceding decades there had been massive changes wrought by technological advances, as cars, planes, telephones and mass media in the forms of radio and film all became commonplace. It was a whole new world, which saw new levels of death and destruction from the advent of mechanized warfare in WWI, new levels of criminality and corruption due to Prohibition, and new levels of prosperity, for some, which came crashing down in the Great Depression which affected everybody. And that all led into a Second World War. It’s no wonder that art and culture responded with a rather bleak view of existence and humanity.

Tech Noir was a thing of the 80s. The preceding decades had seen the horrors of the Vietnam War, the corruption of Watergate, years of inflation followed by a deep recession, with ah ever-present awareness that WWIII could be right around the corner. On top of that, computers were migrating from the realm of science fiction into people’s everyday lives and homes. So that bleakness returned, in considering where we might be going as a society.

An interesting thing about Tech Noir and cyberpunk is that they tend to look at a near future, a future that may now be in the past, like 1984. One could argue the extent to which they were right or wrong in their visions, but I think the point of sci fi is not to be prophetic but to examine the current moment through an imagined setting.

Now in the rhyme scheme of history it feels like we’re in a similar moment of social and technological upheaval. Things like Black Mirror connect to the same theme. But it doesn’t need to be all grimdark dystopia. Technopoly brings up the idea of one-eyed prophets, those who only see the bad or the good, and thus miss the full picture. What is the opposite side? What would Tech Blanc look like?

The overarching theme to all this, I think, is the relationship between technology and humanity. Humans are creative so we make things and develop technologies. But technologies change the way we live and relate to each other and the world around us, and that changes who and how we are, collectively. So we can ask, what does it mean to be human in a digital age? Tech noir offers visions of what is going wrong. It is perhaps more important to envision what going right looks like. What is the future we want to see?

Th point of using a theme in ds106 is to give everyone some area of common ground for collaboration and interaction. It’s meant to be a starting point and a springboard for stories, not a restriction to limit what we do. People are welcome to critique the theme or turn it on its head, if they are so inclined. Any way that they can have fun with it and be creative is good. The theme also lets us think about larger questions about the role of creativity and storytelling in society. What do they do for us? How do they help us think and learn? And if all that is too deep or heavy, there’s always parody…