What place is there for art and beauty in a world of engineers? The question, which would be just as relevant to denounce the future scar of the REM in the Montreal portrait, is asked by the author and philosopher Daniel D. Jacques in his novel California Dream. Moral tales for use by children of the future, which does not have the 1960s as this single reference to a popular song of the time …
Each reader will interpret the fall of this short 144-page novel differently, which, depending on the case, ends on a positive or negative note. The story follows a narrator who, one guesses quite quickly, is a disembodied human intelligence living in a world where the consciousness of each individual is no longer attached to one and the same body, but resides in a digital universe that does not is reminiscent of the modern cloud computing.
Among all these ethereal souls, the narrator is the only one to show sufficient curiosity to retrace the stages which led to its creation. Along the way, he discovers music that he ends up appreciating, fallen or forgotten authors whom he ends up remembering, and even a former philosopher who knew how to make the whole premise of this book fit into a single maxim: “I think , So I am. “
In this disembodied universe governed by rules that are a little too strict, we quickly see that literature and art, which historically have played the role of troublemaker in very rigid societies, are persona non grata. This same fate will await the protagonist of California dream at the end of the dozen short chapters that compose it – each of these chapters taking the form of a short story more or less independent of the others, which nevertheless advances the story towards its inevitable conclusion.
Reengineering reimagined
From California to Chicago via… Napierville, the reader is invited to follow a not always linear path that the author proposes as an illustration of the technological revolution that is taking place these days, courtesy of the tech giants of Silicon Valley: Apple, Google, Facebook – sorry, Meta.
“California engineers feel like they are at the heart of an important revolution that will change the world. Previously, the revolution was rather political. There, it is technological and corporate. The book explores this dream, without its limits. I use the future to better understand the present, ”confided in an interview with Duty Daniel D. Jacques, who admits having had the idea during a visit to the tech campuses of northern California.
He’s not the only one: William Gibson, a popular American author living in British Columbia and widely regarded as the father of cyberpunk literature, has also just published a posthumanist and postapocalyptic novel, titled Agency, which is the direct result of a stay at the legendary The Clift hotel in San Francisco.
For Daniel D. Jacques, California Dream is a first work of fiction. The Quebec author had so far only published very rational and serious essays, dealing as the case with American-style democracy and Quebec-style politics. He felt the need to step into the other side of literary force for the first time, because it was the best way to put his finger on the proverbial bobo in which Western societies keep turning these days. the dagger.
“How will art and philosophy serve this society of tomorrow created by and for engineers? asks Daniel D. Jacques. All that goes rather badly in this new reality. Even Shakespeare is a victim of the cancel culture. Is it better ? Is it a loss? We do not know. “
Body weight
Often, works of anticipatory fiction rely on a pivotal event to speak of the “next world”. When this event is a complete loss of control over technological advancement, we speak of “singularity”: a point in time when machines are freed from human civilization.
Rarely do we take the time to dissect this singularity, which most of the time serves as a narrative mechanism to get to the heart of the matter, to the heart of the story. What Daniel D. Jacques brings original is that he tries to detail the stages of such a singularity: how, for very humanistic reasons, it becomes normal for anyone who wishes to download their consciousness in a synthetic body. Later, people will prefer to download their consciousness to the cloud altogether, and to hell with the bodily envelope!
“The human’s relationship to the body is the other central reflection of the story,” he says. There is something fundamental in the perception we have of the human body. To paraphrase Dante: if the human body no longer exists, what remains of each individual’s identity?
It just goes to show that we will not have finished questioning ourselves collectively on bodily beauty, even once humanity has transcended its physicality and will have massively downloaded onto computer servers …
“I think human history is very paradoxical,” continues Daniel D. Jacques. We celebrate as much as we describe the same things. “It is at the very heart of the posthumansime, adds the author: the catastrophe which in all these technological apocalypse stories will get the better of civilization as we currently know it signal the end of history or its beginning?
A very topical question at a time when the social and political climate, and even the climate itself, point to deep transformations to come on a planetary scale. And to which, today, we can only offer an evasive answer, depending on the mood of the day.
“In any case, we see that the Western conception of the human being begins to disappear”, concludes Daniel D. Jacques. And we no longer know if he is talking about California dream or the Paris Agreement. And it is just as well like that. Good fictions are inspired by reality, but reality also feeds on fiction.
California academics who in the 1960s read Issac Asimov and HG Wells went on to create companies that we know today as Apple, Microsoft, and HP. Let’s just hope that their dream in which some believe they are living will not turn into a nightmare …