This document discusses three options for living with increasing technological mediation: 1) going to war against machines, 2) giving in to mediated reality, or 3) becoming media ourselves. It references theorists like Flusser who saw people becoming "information processors" rather than workers, and Baudrillard who was critical of The Matrix for its "classical, Platonic treatment" of simulation and hyperreality. The document also discusses how technology has become inextricably linked to human identity, community, and experience of the world.

1. Living Information
Media & Information
10 Real Life

2. three options
① war against the machines
② give in to mediated reality
③ we become media

3. three options
① war against the machines
② give in to mediated reality
③ we become media

4. “The upshot is simply a question of time, but
that the time will come when the machines will
hold the real supremacy over the world and its
inhabitants”
Samuel Butler in 1863

7. [living information means] “a person will no longer be a
worker (homo faber) but rather an information processor,
a player with information (homo ludens).”
Vilém Flusser (1920-
1991)

8. three options
① war against the machines
② give in to mediated reality
③ we become media

10. INTERVIEWER
Why do you feel that
Truman’s never come close to
discovering the true nature of his
world?
CHRISTOF
We accept the reality
of the world with which we’re
presented.

12. Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

14. “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and
there in the deserts that are no longer those of Empire, but of
ours. The desert of the real itself.”

15. “...In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such
Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the
space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an
entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive
maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of
Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of
the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it
point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography,
succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such
Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence,
they abandoned it to the Rigors of sun and Rain. In the
western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to
be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the
whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of
Geography.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

18. Jean Baudrillard’s critique of The Matrix:
“its classical, Platonic treatment”

19. “The Matrix is surely
the kind of film about
the matrix that the
matrix would have
been able to
produce.”

20. “simulation is no
longer that of a
territory, a referential
being, or a
substance. It is the
generation by
models of a real
without origin or
reality: a hyperreal”

21. a Matrix-based reality
cannot be fundamentally
altered, as even Neo
ultimately turns out to be
just another inevitable part
of the program.
so what can you do
in a reality that
cannot be changed
by references to that
reality?

22. Baudrillard’s answer:
“theoretical violence, not truth, is the only
resource left to us”

27. three options
① war against the machines
② give in to mediated reality
③ we become media

28. artefacts

36. activities

38. using/making media

39. identity

40. belonging/community

41. feeling/passion

45. arrangements

56. 1839

57. 1816

60. “Technology is not the
nameless other. Technology 'R'
Us: to embrace technology is to
embrace, and face, ourselves.
This we must do, and
fearlessly”
David Cronenberg in 1997