Are you ready to be Uploaded?
There has been an absolute deluge of entertainment lately that is prepping our minds for the digital world that is to come. Virtual reality, the singularity, god-like AI and universe-altering supercomputers are commonplace in today’s sci-fi.
This tech path we’re on is coming at us faster than we can imagine and for the most part, it’s being heralded in.
Books like Ready Player One, shows like Devs, and movies like Free Guy are giving a glimpse into the cyber world “they” are already trying to create. But my favorite recent depiction of this reality is the Amazon Original Upload.
It is a genuinely funny satire on the entire direction that the Mark Zuckerburg, Ray Kurzweil and Klaus Schwaub’s of the world want to take us.
So I thought I would break down some of the most blatant critiques from the show of the future world our “leaders” are trying to deliver us into.
Brief Summary
As always, I will be spoiling aspects of the show, so if you haven’t watched it, go do that first.
In Upload, we’re focused on Nathan who is killed in a self-driving car accident and makes the rash decision to have his consciousness uploaded into a virtual heaven. Here, his vapid, rich girlfriend owns his avatar, his cute customer service rep is referred to as his Angel and the AI helpers are... a little off.
The depiction of the man-made afterlife is exactly what you would expect it to be; a painfully perfect place that just doesn’t feel right. As Nathan attends his own funeral virtually, begins to fall for his Angel, and navigates keeping his trigger-happy girlfriend from deleting him, we get a brilliant, hilarious take on just how imperfect a “perfect world” is when designed by humans with a God complex.
What does the future look like in this reality? And how close are we to it?
Everyone is Chipped
Phones are gone, passwords are irrelevant… all thanks to every human being microchipped. People use a motion on their hands to open a holographic screen that serves as the phones of 2033. They also use it to pay, rate everything from their dates to employees (social credit system style), and enter buildings.
Not a huge leap considering this 2018 article from the The Atlantic depicting how microchipping humans is the future of health. Never has that desire been more inflated than by Covid-19. In Sweden, this is already happening.
This microchip conversation is presented as the cure for abductions, security issues and health monitoring, but are we so sure these people have earned the right to rule over us to this degree?
Infinite Consciousness
There’s no question that the end game for the elite is to be immortal. So this idea of uploading consciousness into a metaverse is far from fiction.
Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and employee of Google. There he advises on the Calico venture which aims to find a cure for aging. That’s right… your favorite search tool wants to solve the problem of death.
“Death is a great tragedy…a profound loss…I don’t accept it…I think people are kidding themselves when they say they are comfortable with death.”
― Ray Kurzweil
And the guy heading the charge… doesn’t believe consciousness is anything beyond a biological function. Despite the fact that there’s no consensus among scientists that consciousness originates in the brain. And it’s still deemed as one of the mysteries of our universe.
“The essential thing is to recognize that consciousness is a biological process like digestion, lactation, photosynthesis, or mitosis”;”
― Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
Virtual Reality
In Upload, the afterlife is no more than a VR simulation. It suffers glitches, gaps in the code and that feeling of an unnatural state. But in the show you get the vibe that they are still in the early phases of this technology. And if these fictional inventors have the same ideas as the ones in our real world, the goal is to make VR indistinguishable from reality.
Mark Zuckerberg, for example, recently said Facebook was shifting from a social media company to a metaverse company. He’s expressed in the past his dissatisfaction with reality and its limitations and his desire to not only make VR equivalent to reality… but better.
The Verge noted that his name for the new workrooms app adopting this model is Horizon. An interesting choice considering that’s the name of sci-fi author Neal Stephenson’s VR world that allows his characters to escape the dystopia of reality. And, you guessed it, it’s also the name of the system that houses the afterlife in Upload.
We’re not even being subtle here, are we Zuck?
Fake Food
Another interesting parallel is the printed food of the future in this show. Over-processed, lab-made food is the dining option of the common man as they look ahead to the next decade.
And why wouldn’t it be?
Already we’ve heard about how the congested nature of our food system is a looming problem the elite seek to solve in the years to come. Lab-grown meat, Impossible/Bill Gates’ Beyond meat burgers, plant-based alternatives and bug-based alternatives aren’t that extreme even right now.
In the show, a character talks about the food tasting off and wondering if her dad’s “fat cartridges” are low. Other than the gag-worthy image that produces, we see this as a direct critique on the direction our food system is headed.
Furthermore, we see how the elite in this show still have access to “real food” when a little girl bites into chicken and doesn’t understand what the bone is.
“Some people have never had real chicken before,” the snobbish girlfriend reminds her family as they mock the child for her ignorance and over indulgence.
I’m ALL FOR eliminating factory farming and leaning towards sustainable practices that generate abundant, organic food for all. But I can assure you… the people who have created our food and health problems today don’t have my trust for creating the eco-friendly, human-healthy alternatives of the future.
AI/Angels
In the afterlife of Upload, there are two key roles outside of the occupants:
AI who does the work of maintaining the grounds and fetching things for guests
Angels who are customer service reps that exist in the real world
For one, the AI are creepy, soulless beings that multiply and give tenants freaky, inhuman stares. It’s hilarious, but again, painfully accurate when you look at things like Sophia the Robot. It’s obvious that machines just aren’t quite there when it comes to emotions and normal social interactions.
And on the other hand, Angels are no more than live people sitting in a cubicle helping uploads with their emotional and digital needs. It’s an odd and uncomfortable techno-swap for all things religious. Adopting, but also mocking heaven as it has been imagined in theology for centuries.
We see all the time how science is the new belief system and technology the God. And I have no doubt we’ll see more inventions adopting names once relegated to religion.
Complete Corporate Takeover
In this future, food companies and tech companies have merged to form the super companies in charge of everything.
Oscar Mayer Intel is desperately attempting to create human clones so Uploads can be downloaded back into reality. Panera Facebook and Nokia Taco Bell are just a few other companies keeping things going in 2033.
But we already know this is reality right? They may not be this overt, but we know all media is owned by six companies. Food and consumer products are controlled by 11 major producers. We see hospitals and medical groups all owned by single brands. We’re in a world already owned by a very, very select few.
The illusion of choice is a little more subtle in our reality, but no different from Upload when you break it down.
Class still Exists
In the show, the penetrating theme is that class still exists. Only the well off can afford the afterlife. And only the super wealthy can live a lavish life in “heaven.” Nathan’s consciousness is owned by his girlfriend who used daddy’s money to get him into the posh post-life resort Lakeview. She monitors his purchases and threatens to cut him off.
An evil ex-billionaire who laughs at killing the last black Rhino to get the taste right in his digital world is still in the lap of luxury. Meanwhile, those who Upload, but whose families can’t afford unlimited data, exist as a 2Gig, they only get free samples of books, sometimes end up naked because they can’t afford digital clothes and freeze until their month renews when they run out of data. Even breathing or talking or thinking costs them.
In a reality where anything can be free, the elite will still want to monetize. And people still suffer. Rest assured, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and beyond will want to profit off this metaverse just as they do in reality.
The Nature of Soul
In this story, the nature of our souls comes up a lot. Is the thing that makes us, us confined to our conscious brain? And is that just a series of complex code that can be replicated in a digital space? Or are humans more than that and being held in a digital prison by the idea that their brain is what makes up their entire being?
It’s a silly show with an important question: Do we have souls? Is there life beyond this world that is worth getting to, even if it means a plunge into the unknown? Are corporate companies creating these metaverses to save humanity? Or is it just the next frontier of the 1%? Is there a spiritual battle taking place where we have to decide if we’ll go the way of organic humans from the past or enter a world of comfort and certainty controlled by the powers that be?
It may seem too far off and too unfathomable to even think about, but already the likes of academics such as Yuval Noah Harari are telling a room full of the richest men and women at Davos to disregard the souls. That humans are hackable animals.
“Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That's what we are.
The power to hack humans can be used for good purposes – like providing much better healthcare. But if this power falls into the hands of a twenty-first-century Stalin, the result will be the worst totalitarian regime in human history. And we already have a number of applicants for the job of twenty-first-century century Stalin.”
If it falls into the hands? Seems ironic since the room he was addressing likely contains those future (and current) Stalins.
The existential question of “What are we?” has never been more important. And as religion is demonized and treated as stupid superstition, we’re losing our ability to connect to our own higher selves. We’ve been reduced to petty Twitter trolls and screen-absorbed assholes when now, more than ever, in the looming shadow of transhumanism we should be asking ourselves… are we just material beings? Do we have value beyond this world?
It’s hard for me to stare at my children and think of them as nothing more than water, electrons and atoms. It’s hard for me to process that unexplainable things that’ve happened in my life can boil down to chance and rationale.
All tech is going to be presented as the cure for our ills. But I think we have to be cautious about what we are relinquishing when we resign ourselves to the digital dictators who already control so much.