Hey Wisecrack, Jared here.
Today, we’ve got a favorite among the Wisecrack
staff.
The tale of humans picked for experimental
augmentations, to find out what happens when
people stop being polite and start getting
real.
At first look, the Deus Ex franchise is a
kind of wet dream for InfoWars enthusiasts:
murderous plots by the Illuminati are carried
out by world governments, while the player
traverses FEMA camps and discovers the truth
behind fake news.
But unlike certain performance artists — “AHHHH!”
— Deus Ex’s forays into conspiracy serve
as more than just a means to sell dietary
supplements.
The game reveals how paranoia informs more
of society’s decisions that we’d like
to admit, and serves as a cautionary tale
for the dangers of technology-to-come.
But there are no gay frogs.
Sorry, internet.
"I don't like them putting chemicals in the
water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay!"
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Deus
Ex.
This video was made in collaboration with
our buddy, Joseph, over at Real Life Lore.
You can learn more about his channel and check
out his related video and the end of this
one.
And if you’re here visiting from Real Life
Lore, welcome and be sure to subscribe.
And spoilers ahead, for all the games.
The Deus Ex series asks two basic questions:
1) What would it mean for society if we could
all become cyborgs with Jax-arms?
And 2) What does the premise that every conspiracy
theory is true mean for the real world?
And before we get into the ethics of skull-guns
and neural enhancement, we have to put on
our tinfoil hats.
There is no shortage of conspiracy theories
in the Deus Ex series.
In the original game, a splinter organization
of the Illuminati called Majestic-12 produces
a nanite virus called “The Grey Death”
as a means to consolidate their power.
"Why contain it?
Let it spill over to the schools, and churches,
let the bodies pile up in the streets.
In the end, they'll beg us to save them.”
As producers of the only cure for the disease
as well, they can easily manipulate others,
while capitalizing off of the disorder wrought
by it.
"The Grey Death is a manmade disease.
Everyone up to the president is at UNATCO's
mercy as long as UNATCO controls the supply
of ambrosia."
In the sequel, Invisible War, the Illuminati
controls two of the most influential groups
in the world: The World Trade Organization,
and The Order, a religious organization opposed
to the WTO.
By managing the conflict between these two
factions, the Illuminati is better able to
control the world.
Finally, in the new prequels, we see the Illuminati
attempt to limit human augmentation, since
having a bunch of engineered superhumans running
around isn’t really great for the whole
“compliant population” thing they’re
going for.
If there is one thread that has run through
the sometimes vastly different games in the
series, it’s paranoia.
Not only is there the conspiracy paranoia,
but also paranoia directed at so-called “outsiders”
and “others.”
“Damn, Clank!
Why don’t you watch where you’re going?“
Ultimately the games reveal the profound power
of paranoia and that it doesn’t matter whether
the paranoia points to truth or not.
Paranoia, independent of truth, shapes our
actions, and ultimately, society.
Early on in the original game, Gunther, your
cyborg coworker who yearns for a skull-gun,
is convinced that the facilities staff is
replacing orange soda in the vending machines
with lemon-lime in an inane and unlikely conspiracy
against him.
"The machine would not make a mistake.”
“It's the maintenance man.
He knows I like orange.”
“So, you think the staff has some kind of
plot?"
"Yes.
They do that on purpose."
Except, 20 years later in the game’s sequel,
it’s revealed in the ruins of Gunther’s
office that he was right all along.
“Denying people their natural born rights
to choose their own artificially-flavored
destinies.
Like I said, something’s wrong with that
machine…”
“Probably some sort of office politics.”
As if to foreshadow the entire rest of the
game, this idea of “just because you’re
paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after
you” becomes the main ethos of Deus Ex.
In Mankind Divided, colleagues spin wild tales
of getting hacked, which turn out to be true
— “We have a lot of enemies.
The people who bombed the train station, you
don't think they'd love to know where we are?
You need to help me figure out who's looking
into us and make them stop.“
Others suspect a police cover up of a bombing,
"They're probably destroying all the evidence
there is right now!"
Also true.
"Well, I was right."
Even you, the player, must navigate who to
trust.
Your old-time boss, David Sarif?
Pilot Alex Vega?
Your new boss at Interpol, who may or may
not be working for the Illuminati?
At every point, the game undermines your trust
in others: as you hack into the emails of
your coworkers, install listening devices,
and get ambushed by enemies who were tipped
off about your arrival.
Hell, even the suicide cult that wants to
merge with computers in Mankind Divided turn
out to be only a few years off from being
right: JC Denton manages to do this with Helios
at the end of the original Deus Ex.
So, why does Deus Ex make a point to validate
even the most far-fetched ideas?
It could be, in part, to tell a greater message
about how paranoia works in the real world.
People who are paranoid often don’t invent
things out of nothing, but instead take interpretive
leaps when over-analyzing the data presented
to them.
"Well, if you thought he was high-strung before,
the attack only made him more manic.
He’s making connections that no one sees,
and some that may or may not be there."
But rather than dismissing this kind of paranoia
as mere delusion, Deus Ex runs with it.
Is a man rambling in the sewers about mind
control right?
"I was part of it, the - the - the hive mind.
Inside the gate.
I ... questioned.
What holds us together?
Where?
Why?"
Unequivocally, yes.
"You mean your attempt to control people.
Amplifying your hypnotic techniques with some
kind of social enhancer."
This brings me to one of Mankind Divided’s
most important commentaries: tracing the relationship
between general paranoia and racial paranoia.
Augmented humans, as a metaphor for racial
discrimination, isn’t exactly subtle.
As a mechanically augmented Interpol agent,
you face harassment from the citizens of Prague
— “F**king augs.” — and literally
live on the wrong side of the tracks as you
witness routine police brutality inflicted
on your augmented peers.
To understand what fuels this discrimination,
we’re turning to cigar enthusiast and psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan.
Or at least, what the Slovenian Dumbledore
writes about him.
And for Slavoj Zizek, our paranosid theories
often reflect on our own identities, ideologies,
and shortcomings, rather than the actual state
of things.
For instance, he cites a story from Lacan
regarding a jealous husband, who, even if
right that his wife is sleeping around, is
still pathologically jealous.
If she stays late at work, he’ll pathologically
assume she’s being unfaithful.
If she starts having male friends, same thing.
As a development of this logic, Zizek cites
Nazi anti-Semitism: if a Jewish person committed
a crime, it could very well be true, but the
fixation on Jewish crime spoke more to German
paranoia about foreigners and pure blood than
to any kind of real issue.
In other words, crime is just crime until
a Jewish person commits it, then it becomes
part of the grand Jewish conspiracy to ruin
the German race, and so on.
You can look at conspiracy theories in the
same light.
Are most laws made in closed-door meetings
with lobbyist and interest groups?
Probably.
Are they all part of a secret cult to serve
their reptilian overlords??
Probably not.
Likewise, in Deus Ex, anti-augmentation advocates
filter all information through the lens that
augmented people are dangerous and possibly,
an affront to nature.
Talking heads use terrorism or the catastrophic
“aug-incident,” where augmented people
were hacked into going into a homicidal rage,
to justify Apartheid-style oppression of augmented
people.
This discrimination then fuels even more violence,
thus making augmented paranoia a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
"Everyone looking over their shoulder, terrified
augs like us are going to attack them again.”
“Somebody probably will.
Treat people like animals long enough, and
they'll start acting like animals."
The power of paranoia to shape public discourse
can be seen in Deus Ex.
Eliza Cassan’s defense of news coverage
meant to spread fear towards the augmented
is just “reporting the news.”
“But Ms. Akim, news outlets are simply reporting
on the current situation.”
And even if the reporting is true, her guest
points out: "You can choose to only show my
shoe, which is very ugly, but that is only
a small part of me.
News outlets only care about a small part.
I'm sorry, Ms. Cassan, but you can't trust
the news outlets if you want to understand
the world."
The “aug debate” in the news functions
on two levels.
1.
As Akim points out, to only report on the
negative aspects of augmented existence, and
2.
To use augmented violence as a validation
for your larger ideological project: in this
case, the Human Restoration Act - a bill that
would either remove or severely limit the
augmentations that people have.
Of course, unlike real-world news, Picus’
news coverage is dictated by the Illuminati,
"Would they?
I was engineered to monitor communications
and data streams.
To find out what people are talking about
and make sure it's being discussed correctly."
As they cover up evidence of water contamination
in Prague, and falsely report that a flight
was taken down by an augmented terrorist — "In
yet another augmented terror attack, 251 passengers
aboard Cista Airlines flight 451 were killed”
— rather than the truth that the plane was
shot down by a military installation.
"Plane went down because of whatever the military
was doing there, not because of some augmented
passenger like Picus claims."
For Zizek, these paranoias don’t tell us
much about reality itself but instead shine
light on the reality behind the paranoia.
For Deus Ex, that reality is a carefully constructed
story meant to combat augmentation, so that
the Illuminati can better control the population
for their pro-business purposes.
But is there an even deeper truth to the way
paranoia operates in the game?
While the real world, is not governed by the
Illuminati (depending on who you ask), one
could argue that it is governed by the basic
principle which the Illuminati in Deus Ex
understands: the state of exception.
According to philosopher Giorgio Agamben,
there is a hidden law that lies behind both
modern liberal democracies and the totalitarian
regimes of the 20th century: the exception.
We’ve talked about this before in our Walking
Dead and Attack on Titan videos, but Deus
Ex’s exploration is wholly unique.
Agamben builds off the theory of sometimes
right but always-an-asshole Carl Schmitt,
who argued that what defines sovereignty is
not the law, per se, but the ability to suspend
the law - to make the exception.
For Agamben, this suspension of law marks
all totalitarian regimes: the concentration
camps were a physical space where normal law
was suspended for more than a decade: a state
of exception.
Whereas our modern liberal democracies aren’t
building death camps, the state of exception
is an always-imminent component of modern
governance.
Usually in the name of an national emergency,
or an existential threat, governments today
regularly creates “zones of exception”
where the law no longer applies, or create
classes of people who are “outside” the
normal functioning of the law, and thus, exist
in this kind of exceptional state.
Prisoners of war, protected by international
law, get replaced by enemy combatants, who
get sent to GitMo, where regular US law doesn’t
apply.
In Deus Ex, this logic seems implicit to the
conspiracy-theory favorite FEMA.
In the name of managing emergencies, they
build detention camps for political prisoners
and implement martial law.
The segregated Utulek complex of Mankind Divided
presents a similar zone of exception.
It resembles a mix of Apartheid-era South
Africa, Jewish ghettos, the Kowloon Walled
City and modern day refugee camps.
The player witnesses horrifying examples of
police brutality and augmented people who
live in constant fear.
All in the name of security.
And when tensions boil over, such as when
an augmented rights activist is assassinated
this civil unrest justifies even more repression.
If the Illuminati wants to spread chaos, like
staging a train station bombing, it’s because
they understand that chaos breeds people desiring
security, and when people desire security,
it’s all the easier to suspend basic rights
and exert more authority.
While we may think of chaos and order as opposites,
the game understands how they can become entangled
in the modern world: Chaos is manufactured
in discrete ways in order for oppressive powers
to maintain control.
But besides illuminating - no pun intended
- how security operates even in our own non-Illuminati
world, Deus Ex also uses the state of exception
as just one of its many criticisms of transhumanism.
Transhumanism is the idea that technology
will help us overcome human limitations like
disease and scarcity.
Prosthetics, contact lenses, and in vitro
fertilization, are just stepping stones in
the greater transhumanist project.
Transhumanism is baked into the very idea
of human augmentation in Deus Ex, however,
rather than blindly celebrating transhumanism,
it portends everything that could possibly
go wrong.
As the human race unlocks human potential
and mastery over nature, that technology becomes
available to individuals and groups, and can
potentially fall into the wrong hands.
Even augmentation technology, developed by
the Illuminati, soon escaped their control
as private corporations entered the fray.
This forced the Illuminati to change their
stance and oppose augmentation.
“No.
By going public with this discovery, Sarif
is forcing our hand.”
Invisible War starts with a terrorist attack
that turns everything into a gray goo, and
in Mankind Divided there exists an underground
market for augmentations, which is likely
assisting both the good guys and bad guys.
As such, the destructive potential of technology
often necessitates permanent states of emergencies
and martial law that Agamben’s work was
critical of.
Basically as technology gets too epic, the
government will have little problem convincing
you that your rights have to be suspended
for the good of everyone.
But it’s not just the state of exception
that’s a problem for the transhumanist future.
JBS Haldane, one of the earliest thinkers
of transhumanism, warned in 1924 that society
would have a hard time keeping pace with the
progress of technology.
In “Daedalus; or, Science and the Future,”
he wrote that “..the tendency of applied
science is to magnify injustices until they
become too intolerable to be borne, and the
average man whom all the prophets and poets
could not move, turns at last and extinguishes
the evil at its source.”
In other words, technology will make social
injustices worse, until societal anger will
boil over into a full-on rage.
In Deus Ex, more often than not, the dangers
of technology are thrust upon the poor.
Those who are augmented need to constantly
take Neuropozyne to stop their body from rejecting
their augmentations, but those with means
can much more easily obtain the expensive
drug.
And, in the case of manual laborers or soldiers
who are augmented by their employers, — “Let
me guess, most of the laborers were augmented
with heavy duty industrial rigs.” — or
the government, — “Send you where they
want.
Make you do what they want.
Replace parts on you whenever and however
they want.”
— they exist in a precarious state where
the maintenance of their augmentations is
contingent on them maintaining the same or
similar job.
Rather than suggesting that human evolution
through technology will level the playing
field, Deus Ex suggests societal forces will
make inequality worse.
And just as Haldane warns that this tension
will cause people to rise up and root out
evil at its source, we see two competing movements
in the game focused on this same thing.
In Human Revolution, The Humanity Front uses
violences to stop the spread of augmentation,
and in Mankind Divided a legal solution exists
in the Human Restoration Act.
Meanwhile, augmented people slowly entertain
violence as a political strategy, until the
assassination of Talos Rucker results in full-on
riot.
"You know word of Rucker's death is going
to spread, don't you?
And when that happens, the head of state police
assures me Golem City will become a warzone.”
Another idea trumpeted by some transhumanists
is the idea of the singularity a point at
which artificial intelligence will explode
the rate of technological development.
In the original Deus Ex, Bob Page hopes to
create his own twisted version of this by
merging with the Helios AI, but instead, the
player is given the option to merge with Helios
to rule the post-singularity world as a benevolent
dictator.
"You will be who you will be.
We are our choices.
We can choose to move humanity away from this."
The game doesn’t necessarily put any kind
of judgment on this, but the solution still
feels a bit icky.
And afterwards, when the merger between JC
Denton and Helios doesn’t go as planned,
the technological infrastructure of the world
collapses, and chaos envelops the world.
"JC.
The net's going... the net's going black!”
The message is not-so-subtly found in the
name of the two AIs that usher in the singularity:
Daedelus and Icarus.
"We are Daedalus.
We are Icarus.
The barriers between us have fallen, and we
have become our own shadows.”
According to legend, Daedalus was an Ancient
Greek inventor who invented man-made flight.
His son, Icarus, plummets to his death after
using his invention and flying too close to
the sun.
The Collapse can be viewed in this light,
as a too-fast and too-reckless technological
development that comes, metaphorically, crashing
down.
"You don't know what you're doing.
Everything will be lost.
Everything!
The world will fall to pieces!"
Haldane believed the only hope is for morality
to keep pace with science.
Deus Ex explores the moral questions inherent
in our technology-driven future.
Is it right for companies to augment their
workers?
Instead of asking this beforehand, the prevailing
logic in the game is: augment first, ask questions
later.
What about installing chips to limit a person’s
augmentation if they say, go on a homicidal
rage?
A brief debate may happen on live TV, while
legislators are trying to pass the bill, but
companies have already developed the technology
before anyone decides whether this technology
should even exist.
Technology first, morality later.
And that’s a recipe for disaster.
In a way, Deus Ex is forcing us to ask these
questions.
We can find Talos Rucker offering a robust
criticism of government’s limiting the abilities
of the augmented.
And even though we’re a bit far from Jax-arms,
the games can make us question the technological
progress in our own world.
"Usually a humanitarian disaster like this
would get a lot of press and foreign aid,
but given that these are augmented people..."
Social media has radically redefined how we
engage with the world, and we’ve only begun
to ask questions about its influence, after
we suspect it has done something egregiously
wrong.
So, what do you think Wisecrack?
Will art like Deus EX convince us to take
a critical look at technology before we decide
to universally adopt it?
Or are we diving head first into a nightmare?
And one more question.
In a world where people trying to secede in
places like Texas, Catalonia, and even California
seems to be slowly getting more popular, the
original Deus Ex seems weirdly prophetic.
There’s the National Secessionist Forces,
and Texas’ troubled attempt to leave The
Union.
But how would that actually work?
