(2021-02-05) Austin #150 Bright Size Life

Drew Austin: #150: Bright Size Life. I haven’t really kept up with animated films lately but whenever I periodically check in, as I did last week by watching Pixar’s latest, Soul, I’m once again stunned by how much better they keep getting

Maybe the distinct popularity of Pixar movies and animation more broadly is their ability to present an unbroken illusion

CGI is easier to tolerate now than it was in its awkward adolescence.

Or maybe we’re finally just used to it, and have permanently suspended that disbelief

David Graeber’s famous complaint about recent technological progress—that we were promised flying cars but got apps instead—makes the essential observation that our technologies of simulation have improved dramatically as our physical infrastructure and built environment have stagnated, widening the gap between the two.

Maybe—I’m playing devil’s advocate here—we should just admit that crafting brilliant illusions and spinning vivid narratives are simply more exciting than building something material, and now that we can do the former with unprecedented fidelity, that’s all we need.

The more we embrace this, as the pandemic has forced us to in an extreme way, the blurrier the lines between fantasy and reality get, fomenting confusion that now chaotically spills into new domains, creating a crisis of boundaries in fields ranging from politics to finance to journalism.

When Elon Musk vaulted past Jeff Bezos to become the world’s wealthiest human last month, it was immediately clear that he’s a much better candidate for the role.

The juggernaut that Bezos actually built is considerably more impressive, ironically, but he was smart enough to make it seem as boring and invisible as possible.

In 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote, “Overexposure to manufactured illusions soon destroys their representational power. The illusion of reality dissolves, not in a heightened sense of reality as we might expect, but in a remarkable indifference to reality.” Reading that today, it already feels like the concern of a different era—which means that it’s exactly right. Who needs flying cars anyway?