INTRODUCTION 0.0: YOU WILL
In 1993, AT&T released a series of commercials portraying a set of hypothetical near-futures. Directed by David Fincher, the “You Will” series followed a general structure: a “what-if” science-fiction scenario is proposed by a voiceover, coupled with visuals illustrating the concept. Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away? Have you ever crossed the country without stopping for directions? Sent someone a fax from the beach? After flashing through scenes of these hypothetical situations, the narrator states that “you will” do all of these things. All of this—the rise of the Internet of Things, GPS systems, the digitization of media—are going to be made possible through AT&T. Regardless if they were the company to bring these technologies to the public, AT&T was generally correct about the slew of predictions they made in this series of advertisements. The “You Will” commercials are without a doubt portrayals of a retrofuture. Retrofutures are a historical vision of what was to come, a fictional time period in which our real present either currently exists within or has already experienced.
The fictional aspect of retrofutures are more obvious as time passes and their predictions are revealed as heavily biased by the historical period they were made in. As an example, it has been decades since the space race optimism surrounding 2001: A Space Odyssey faded, and two decades after the film was set, there are no permanent colonies anywhere in the solar system. To put it simply, these renditions of the future are products of their time. They reflect the design sensibilities and cultural interests of their respective present day. AT&T’s “You Will” series is surprisingly prescient in comparison to the majority of retrofutures. Its prophetic accuracy is seen clearest in the reactions of modern audiences watching reuploads of the commercials on sites like YouTube.
“Have you ever hated people on the Internet that you’ve never met?” a YouTube commenter named Jerry Lifsey asked, mimicking the commercials’ narrative structure. “You will with AT&T.” The majority of the comments on the “You Will” reuploads tap into the same vein of cynicism. Despite the technical aspects of AT&T’s retrofuture being mostly accurate, the cultural context still dates it. AT&T predicted that tablets, video conferencing, and smartwatches would exist—but they could not predict how all of these technologies would be used and complicated by people.
The aim of this thesis is to examine the techno-social disconnects that arise in an era saturated with interconnected forms of virtual interaction. The “You Will” series and its context as a retrofuture made obsolete by its inability to predict the social climate of the modern day is but one of many examples. Countless types of groups (including corporations, nation-states, etc.) continue to portray and imagine the technology of the modern era in ways that are contradictory to their real-world implementations. Even one of the more recent terms for the Internet, “the cloud,” implies an amorphous and seamless online experience that ignores the physicality, the fragility, of virtual spaces (Hu X). Increasingly prominent virtual environments are constrained by the limited viewpoints of the people who create them, and new complications arise once those viewpoints are challenged by unmediated interactions with user-bases in the real world. The specific subset of unmediated interactions that this thesis looks at result in virtual failures: events that in some way contradict the dominant ideological framework attached to a virtual environment. The following chapter delves further into this concept of virtual failure, calling on scholarship in Media Studies by figures like Julian Raul Kücklich, Rosa Menkman, and Lisa Nakamura, while incorporating ideas behind virtual sovereignty.
The "You Will" series hints at an acknowledgment of the problems that arise with new digital tech. Throughout all of the commercials, a majority of the future scenarios are illustrated with some conflicting imagery. AT&T sets the retrofuture scene to a soaring, optimistic score full of smiling people, but the environment does not reflect the same brightness. The “You Will” commercials are set in a world of shadows punctuated by the flares of convex CRT screens and neon lights.
The commercials have a cyberpunk aesthetic that would not be out of place in a film like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. This is a seemingly odd choice, filming a commercial about a hopeful and exciting future on darkened sets. But after waves of eighties scifi media washing over the mainstream, a flurry of dark retrofutures and experimental tech teetering on the bleeding edge, what else better depicts a future than the grit of cyberpunk? It is a visual language that had been wedded to the mainstream’s conceptualization of “what comes next.”
Technology’s usages and presentations cannot be divorced from a cultural lens. AT&T’s cheerful cyberpunk is one of the most visual examples of this. The company could not introduce the tablet, the GPS navigation system, or the smartwatch as products of isolation. Without context these new devices would mean nothing to the audience—small, meaningless objects of metal and glass. So the products were situated in the visual signifiers of science-fiction, put into dialogue with the preexisting tropes of cyberpunk. The smartwatch, the mobile fax, the remote meeting all meant something now. They were understandable and given the power of prescience because they were now contextualized in a familiar future. A future so familiar, you had seen it on your TVs, in the movie theaters, and through countless novels (Fisher 2001).
This does not resolve the cognitive dissonance of dystopian sci-fi visuals implemented to advertise a positive outlook on new technologies. In fact, I do not aim to resolve that contradiction and others like it. I want to bring attention to these moments where the intention behind technology is complicated by the people who use it, and this thesis will build a set of analyses around specific case studies to emphasize and understand these complications. To categorize what these techno-social interactions are, making them separate from others (such as the conversations surrounding glitch art), this thesis refers to this specific subset of virtual behavior and aftermath as technological disruptions. Defining technological disruptions and the events that fit their definition is one of the thesis’ main goals.
