Posted by: Chris
Hello all (3 of you). Long time no post. My being between computers makes this seemingly simple task a bit more complicated. I actually have a backlog of content to upload, but for now here are my notes for my reading of Dick’s Paycheck:
8
The last thing he remembered was stepping into an elevator with Rethrick. And it was late fall. And in New York.
Viktor Mayer-Schonberger suggests that we should be able to ascribe an expiry date to information, ostensibly to free us from the tyranny of a flawless cultural memory, or the dubious objectives of the corporations who so eagerly purchase that information. Mayer-Schonberger does not appear to consider how things might play out if someone else had the power to decide that expiration date for us.
The SP, Security Police, have almost unlimited power. They’re teaching the schoolchildren to inform, now. But we all saw that coming.
Foucault’s panopticon. Also, George Orwell would like a word. Is it this week that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, or was that last week?
Remember? You probably remember it better than I. After all, it was just a day or so ago for you.
Aristotle argues that recollection must follow a natural sequence. Because recollection is sequential, we have to remember A to get to B, and finally to the thing we want to remember: C. It varies from case to case how far back we have to remember before the goal, and how much we end up remembering after the goal. In Jennings’ case, he’s been forced back to the natural starting point: A. Everything else has been wiped. I’m not entirely certain how A in this case becomes a recent fresh memory. This suggests not merely that subsequent memories have been “deleted”, but that Jennings’ entire brain has been reset to its state at the time of A. Carr’s plastic brain has thus become elastic.
Two years! Two years out of his life, gone forever. It didn’t seem possible.
Jennings is in a state of shock and denial not unlike that experienced by Alice during the early stages of Alzheimer’s Disease.
9
But he was two years older; he had just that much less to live. It was like selling part of himself, part of his life. And life was worth plenty, these days. He shrugged. Anyhow, it was in the past.
Jennings’ attention span here is fleeting. Does he have digital dementia; perhaps the culturally inflicted attention deficit alleged by Carr? Perhaps he is merely resolved to his memory loss.
10
As the doors slid shut Jennings got a mental shock. This was the last thing he remembered, this elevator. After that he had blacked out.
As Alice progresses through the random, merciless neural degeneration of AD, she reaches a point where the neurons of individual memories are intact, but the neurons which structure them temporally (Aristotle: A-B-C) have been lost. This renders her susceptible to triggers brought on by what Jose van Dijck would call mediated memory objects. The butterfly necklace takes Alice back to her childhood, prompting her to believe that her long-dead sister Anne will be jealous that she is wearing it. Jennings here experiences a similar trigger when he enters the familiar elevator.
Rethrick pushed a code key against a door.
Codes seem to be stored on keys in this universe rather than in heads. Is this a form of digital dementia?
‘Kelly,’ Rethrick said, ‘look whose time finally expired.’
It does indeed look like Dick has pre-empted Mayer-Schonberger’s idea of an expiry date by half a century. We’ll have to keep reading to determine his verdict on such an expiry date.
11
But you don’t know what factors might have persuaded you, before your mind was cleaned.
The language here is of the mind being “cleaned” like a hard drive. I’m going to stick with my notion of the mind being made to snap-back to a prior state like a rubber band for now. Carr says the mind is plastic, not elastic. But this is science fiction. “We have the technology.”
Jennings stared down at what he held in his palm. From the cloth sack he had spilled a little assortment of items. A code key. A ticket stub. A parcel receipt. A length of fine wire. Half a poker chip, broken across. A green strip of cloth. A bus token.
Instead of money, Jennings has accepted for his payment a collection of van Dijck’s mediated memory objects. But since mediated memories are a product of the interaction between physical objects and the personal and cultural experiences our brains ascribe to them, Jennings sees no value in the objects, as he can no longer provide that context from his own memory. To him, they are only worthless objects.
12
His head jerked up. The door of the cruiser was open. A man was kneeling, pointing a heat-rifle straight at his face. A man in blue-green. The Security Police.
This paragraph simultaneously exemplifies the literary process of delayed decoding, as well as the mental process of recollection. Heat rifle > green uniform, SP officer. A > B > C. Aristotle permeates this story.
13
The officer leaned toward him. ‘Where is that Plant, Mr Jennings. Where is it located?’
‘I don’t know.’
Quintilian’s memory palace did not help Jennings here. Looks like Rethrick bulldozed the house.
‘You repair high-quality computers and allied equipment?’ The officer consulted his notebook. ‘You’re considered one of the best in the country, according to this.’
Jennings’ personal memory has been obliterated. An expiry date was imposed upon it. But no such expiry date exists for cultural memory; the SP have a file on him. The live in a digital era that has forgotten how to forget. They are kind of like Google.
‘I don’t know. I suppose so. I don’t have any idea what I did during the two years. You can believe me or not.’ Jennings stared wearily down at the floor.
Like Alice, Jennings feels not only the personal effects of forgetting, but the cultural ones as well. He is embarrassed and dejected that he cannot account for where he has been or what he has been doing for the last two years.
14
Don’t you want to cooperate with your Government? Why should you conceal information from us?
Who is the government of the week here: Google? Carr describes Google’s efforts to have everyone online, with access to all information all the time, for the ultimate purpose of monetizing their eyeballs. Google is omniscient, but that omniscience is dependant entirely upon the participation of its users. The Government is subject to the same limitation. They need Jennings to enter text into the search field.
He touched the door with a code key, releasing the magnetic lock.
The SP driver stores codes on a keycard too, rather than in his head. Digital dementia again?
Jennings sat silently, starting down at the floor. The SP wanted to know about Rethrick Construction. Well, there was nothing that he could tell them. They had come to the wrong person, but how could he prove that? The whole thing was impossible. Two years wiped clean from his mind. Who would believe him? It seemed unbelievable to him, too.
Jennings once again finds himself in a predicament similar to Alice: he suffers from an uncommon mental condition, and is frustrated by his inability to adequately articulate his situation to people who have not shared in his experiences.
His mind wandered, back to when he had first read the ad. It had hit home, hit him direct. Mechanic wanted, and a general outline of the work, vague, indirect, but enough to tell him that it was right up his line. And the pay! Interviews at the Office. Tests, forms.
Jennings now starts at –B, works his way to –A, then back to A, and now appears to have uncovered B, which was supposedly eliminated from his mind. Not bad, Aristotle, not bad.
15
He touched the door. Locked, the triple-ring magnetic locks. He had worked on magnetic locks many times. He had even designed part of a trigger core.
Jennings now draws on memories prior to the cleaning. The lock is a sort of mediated memory object.
Jennings dug into his pocket, bringing out the code key, the ticket stub, the wire. The wire! Thin wire, thin as human hair. Was it insulated? He unwound it quickly. No.
Memories, says van Dijck, are never perfect, and never really permanent. They are destroyed and recreated anew with each recollection. Jennings is doing this right now. He is creating a remediated memory object in the wire.
His knelt down, running his fingers expertly across the surface of the door.
Procedural memory.
16
Jennings only half saw the people sitting around him. There was no doubt of it: he had not been swindled. It was on the level. The decision had actually been his.
Jennings seems to have all the trappings of recollection except for the memory itself. He is confident, his body remembers what it hasn’t done yet. Dick seems to be asking us how we might distinguish memory from instinct. Nature from nuture.
17
The he of those two years had known things that he did not know now, things that had been washed away when the company cleaned his mind. Like an adding machine which had been cleared. Everything was slate-clean. What he had known was gone, now.
Jennings shares with Alice the frustration of knowing exactly what he has forgotten, and yet still being unable to recollect. Both characters remain in control of their faculties.
When an individual person was defenseless, a business was not. The big economic forces had managed to remain free, although virtually everything else had been absorbed by the Government.
Good to know that Google will survive whatever bloody revolution awaits us.
18
He felt suddenly in his pocket. And there were the remaining trinkets. Surely he had intended them to be used!
Jennings is in constant imagined negotiation with his past self as though he were a separate entity. Is this in any way similar to Quintilian’s technique of the memory palace? Jennings is attempting to estrange himself from his past life, so that he might infer forgotten details about it objectively, relying on logic rather than memory. It has more to do with inference than Quintilian imagined, but the technique of ascribing concrete texture to abstract notions we are trying to recall appears to be similar between the two.
He brought out the five objects and studied them. The green strip of cloth. The code key. The ticket stub. The parcel receipt. The half poker chip. Strange, that little things like that could be important.
Mediated memory objects seem unimportant to anyone who does not possess the requisite contextual memories to attach to them. Jennings is looking at his objects as if they belong to someone else, and in a sense, they do.
19
A burst of despair swept through him. Maybe it was just coincidence, the wire and the token. Maybe-
Jennings, like Alice, must confront self-doubt. How much of what he knows can be taken to be true, presuming the truth that his memory is unreliable?
What good was a ticket stub? It was creased and bent, folded over, again and again. He couldn’t go anyplace with that. A stub didn’t take you anywhere. It only told you where you had been.
Where you had been!
The written ticket stub is an externalized memory device – hypomnesis. It’s a BlackBerry. Because it is externalized memory, it survived the tampering performed on Jennings’ internal memory. Socrates would be condemnatory. Plato would be amused. Derrida would seize upon an opportunity to deconstruct the entire binary nature of western philosophy. Alice would be grateful.
He smiled. That was it. Where he had been. He could fill in the missing letters. It was enough.
Perhaps the mind-cleaning wiped nine neural connections to the memory of where Jennings had been. But perhaps again the ticket stub, as both an externalized and mediated memory object, triggered recollection via an unharmed tenth neural connection.
A quick spring from the bus, hoping the Police wouldn’t be there to stop him-
But somehow he knew they wouldn’t. Not with the other four things in his pocket.
Jennings, like Socrates, is content to surrender himself to divine will. His mediated memory trinkets have become good-luck charms.
20
The rocket let him off at the edge of town, at a tiny brown field.
Jennings suffers from a memory gap. With a jarring transition from Jennings’ disembarking from the bus to his disembarking from the Intercity rocket, Dick inflicts a similar gap upon the reader.
He began to walk, his hands in his pockets, looking around him. A newspaper office, lunch counters, hotels, poolrooms, a barber shop, a television repair shop. A rocket sales store with huge showrooms of gleaming rockets. Family size. And at the end of the block the Portola Theater.
Is Jennings taking a mental inventory of his surroundings for later use, like Simonides?
21
Jennings shook his head. ‘Can’t stand the big cities. I never liked cities.’
Is this a comment on the ways in which the sensory overload brought about by urban spaces might hinder certain types of memory? Carr retreated to the country to write his book.
Maybe he had made the wrong inference from the ticket stub. But the ticket meant something, unless he was completely wrong about everything.
Socrates, Quintilian and Carr all allege that reliance on hypomnesis (externalized memory) frees the mind from the burden of remembering, but also robs the mind of the ability to develop a deep understanding of that externalized knowledge – Derrida identifies this conundrum as the pharmakon, and Quintilian consoles the poor soul who cannot rely on his internal memory that he can at least still be Obama’s speech writer. Jennings here, being forced to rely entirely on externalized memories in the absence of internal ones, is appropriately hesitant to accept the credibility of his sources.
‘You want to pitch hay?’
Jennings laughed. He paid for his coffee. ‘Not very much. Thanks.’
Could Jennings survive without his cyborg prosthesis – his trinkets? For that matter, if all the slaves in Greece were to revolt one day, could Socrates pick up a hoe and survive as a farmer?
22
‘What kind of work is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Where do they do the hiring?’
‘I don’t know.’
The cabbie has a cultural memory gap that matches Jennings’ personal one. Both were manufactured by Goog- err, I mean Rethrick Construction.
23
Jennings stared at him. The cabbie was tracing a line on his shoulder. Suddenly Jennings understood. A flood of relief rushed over him.
I am increasingly convinced that Jennings’ procedural memory is intact.
And apparently the trinkets were going to see him through. One for every crisis. A pocketful of miracles, from someone who knew the future!
Jennings has apparently been elevated from the predicament of poor Phaedrus to the lofty heights of the Oracle of Delphi. Or at least his past self is. Err… past-future self?
25
They burned through the skull there. Cut a tiny wedge from the brain. All your memories of the two years. They located them and burned them out.
Carr presents research that indicates that short-term memories, once they are converted into long-term memory in the hippocampus, are gradually dispersed throughout the cerebral cortex. Dick’s neurobiology may be necessarily out of date here when he suggests that two years’ worth of memories can be positively identified as residing in one particular spot and drilled out.
It would be better for me if I did remember.
Jennings is trying to bargain with amnesia again. Alice eventually resolved herself to the loss of her yesterdays, which she acknowledges in her speech at the climax of the book.
26
I hate the Police. We all do, every one of us. They’re after us all the time.
Kelly curses the panoptical surveillance state. Don’t suppose she’d care much for the NSA.
I’ve never been to the plant. I don’t even know where it is.
It is a peculiar coincidence that Kelly has no knowledge of the location of the Plant, yet lives in the very city in which it is based and commutes away from that city to work in their satellite office. I don’t trust her.
Anyone fighting communism was automatically good, a few decades ago.
This comment places the story either in the late twentieth century or early twenty-first; half a century after Dick’s writing.
Rethrick Construction has its technocracy.
Just like Google.
27
No. Not time travel. Berkowsky demonstrated that time travel is impossible. This is a time scoop, a mirror to see and a scoop to pick up things. These trinkets. At least one of them is from the future. Scooped up. Brought back.
If these objects are from the future, and can be retrieved from that future, but people – who possess intentionality – cannot themselves travel through time, then time, and therefore memory, are deterministic in Dick’s universe. See Dick’s ‘The Electric ant’ as well as Vonnegut’s Slaughter-house Five.
When I was working with Rethrick, I must have used the mirror. I looked into my own future.
If time and memory are deterministic, it becomes slightly less impressive that Jennings can reconstruct these memories. Sure, he can retrace A, B, And C, but A, B, and C have always existed. They have been committed to the Sumerian tablets, much to Socrates’ chagrin and Plato’s amusement.
29
I need someone I can turn the material over to. I don’t dare keep it myself. As soon as I have it I must turn it over to someone else, someone who’ll hide it where I won’t be able to find it.
When Rethrick imposes an expiry date on Jennings’ memory, the latter is at a disadvantage. When Jennings chooses an expiry date for himself on his knowledge of the location of the evidence, he tries to make it an advantage. We will see how well this plays out for our hero.
The two of them crouched, looking across the fields at the hill beyond.
Here Dick inflicts another memory gap upon the reader.
31
I always liked you. You know that. You knew when you came to me.
Ah, love that transcends forgetting; a cheapened version of Alice’s relationship with her daughter Lydia. I’m such an overbearing cynic sometimes.
32
Their faces were weathered, gray and lined. Men of the soil. Jennings took his place between two burly farmers as the truck started up. They did not seem to notice him. He had rubbed dirt into his skin, and let his beard grow for a day. At a quick glance he didn’t look much different from the others.
Jennings’ recollection is damaged, but his foresight is of a level of perfection only possible in fiction.
He felt at his neck. There, inside the gray sweater, a flatplate camera hung like a bib around his neck.
My God. Jennings is wearing an Autographer. I think I need sleep.
33
Jennings glanced at the worktables. Had he worked here, not so long ago? A sudden chill went through him. Suppose he were recognized?
This passage demonstrates a limitation to Mayer-Schonberger’s notion of an expiry date – it’s only advantageous if everyone participates. It’s all well and good if sensitive information about you is removed from the internet after a period of time, but what if somebody makes a backup?
34
The foreman was studying him intently. ‘I don’t remember you. Let me see your tab.’
The foreman’s imagined amnesia is contrasted with Jennings’ actual amnesia, and the former’s response is paranoia.
35
But the door did not open. The key he held in his hand was the wrong key.
Aristotle explains that when you are contemplating an object presented in the present, it is actually two things you are contemplating; the literal object in front of you, and the contextualized idea of the object in front of you. If you were only able to recall the literal object, you would have no ability to contextualize it and thus understand what you were remembering. If it is the idea – consciously understood to be a representation of the actual thing – on the other hand, that you are remembering, you can attach meaning to it.
This is why, for example, we may have a memory of a photo and be unsure whether we’ve seen only the photo or have actually seen the place it represents. On the other hand, this is how one thought allows us to recall another from the past (a sudden idea). This happens when you contemplate a literal object as a contextualized idea.
The other side of this is sometimes we remember things from our contextualized memories that didn’t actually happen to us. This happens when you contemplate a contextualized idea as a literal object. Jennings appears to make this mistake in assuming that the particular keycard his past self chooses to pass along would necessarily open the door to the time scoop.
A chill went through him. Maybe the future was variable. Maybe this has been the right key, once. But not any more!
I find myself doubting this. Everything else Dick has told us up to this point has been oppressively deterministic. This statement appears to be Dick’s attempt at a red herring.
36
And there it was, all around him, the schematics, the mirror, papers, data, blueprints.
Outside of spy movies, physical media doesn’t generally have an expiry date. Too bad for Rethrick.
He flicked his camera on. Against his chest the camera vibrated, film moving through it.
That Autographer again; what if Jennings were to misalign his shot, like I did so many times when I went out with the bloody thing? But Jennings won’t make such a mistake, such is the magic of fiction.
The film came to an end.
Such a tiny camera being conceivable as a thing that can run out of film is a curious anachronism now. Reminds me of Star Trek First Contact, when Zefram Cochrane pulls out his “tunes” in the form of a tiny, emerald like disc that has evidently replaced the CD in this version of the mid 21st century, imagined in 1998. With the rise of digital media, technology has obviously taken a different path in both instances.
37
Suddenly he laughed. He walked quickly up to the door. ‘Faith,’ he murmured, raising his hand. ‘That’s something you should never lose.’
‘What – what’s that?’
‘Faith in yourself. Self-confidence.’
The door slid back as he held the code key against it.
Jennings is a bloody prophet. Aristotle establishes early on that we cannot recollect something in the future. In a way, Jennings does just this. In Dick’s clockwork universe, Jennings can perceive the placement and rotation of the cogs, and so becomes his own god. The whole mining of the parting of the Red Sea just makes the whole thing funnier.
40
He knows that someone got away, but he doesn’t know who it was. Undoubtedly, he assumes it was an SP man.
Couldn’t he use the time mirror to find out?
Uh oh. Well, for Jennings anyway. Dick seems to be covering his bases here in terms of conceivable plot-holes.
Anyhow, I know he intended better things than that. He laid careful plans. The trinkets. He must have planned everything long in advance.
I’m starting to wonder whether he is Jennings from the past, or Rethrick setting a trap. That’d be a neat plot twist.
41
He had seen all this and understood, begun to ponder. The problem of the mind cleaning. His memory would be gone when he was released. Destruction of all the plans. Destruction? There was the alternate clause in the contract. Others had seen it, used it. But not the way he intended!
This failsafe plan, and its foresight, echoes Alice’s plans for suicide when she can no longer pass her personal memory test. A past self speaking to a future self, as if from a time capsule. Dick merely makes the time travel element explicit.
43
A gambling and girl joint. One of the few institutions that the Police left alone.
Not even a chrome-coated dystopia has ever quashed either of these things.
Rethrick’s face was hard.
Another fit of Dick-induced amnesia. I could have worded that better. Anyways, weren’t we still with Jennings in the preceding paragraph, as he hid out in a dive?
‘Why didn’t you use the mirror?’ he said.
Rethrick’s face flickered. ‘The mirror? You did a good job, my friend. We tried to use the mirror.’
My earlier theory has been disproven. “He” really is Jennings from the past, and not some super-sneaky Rethrick. Also, Dick has neatly sewn up what would otherwise be a pretty glaring plot hole.
44
Jennings smiled. ‘I had no idea he did anything like that. I underestimated him. His protection was even-‘
This is the first time in a while that I’ve been reminded that Jennings actually does have amnesia. Otherwise he’s far too competent for me to notice. Sort of like Socrates constantly insisting that he isn’t wise. When he does misstep, nobody notices because he’s such a smooth talker and never acknowledges it even when he’s in the right. We might also draw a comparison to Alice’s contentment when her intellectual fortitude trumps the limits of her Alzheimer’s and she can continue to carry herself with finesse in academic discourse.
45
You and I are going to run Rethrick Construction together. That’ll be the way, from now on. And no one will be burning my memory out, for their own safety.
Dick seems here to definitively disavow any benefit to the use of expiry dates in personal or cultural memory, whether self-inflicted or administered by a third party. Expiry dates never amount to anything good in this story, regardless of their aim.
46
You don’t know what the company is for, Jennings! How dare you try to come in!
Google is a private party. Actually, it seems both Rethrick Construction and the Government in this story are analogues for Google. Maybe they can take turns being the NSA.
48
‘As soon as you gave me the papers I put them in a good safe place.’ She smiled a little. ‘No one will find them but me. I’m sorry.’
See two points prior. This definitely confirms for me that Dick would have rejected Mayer-Schonberger’s proposed expiry date, even when self-administered. It just backfired on poor Jennings here.
Someday, when Kelly marries, there’ll be an heir to carry it on after me.
I’ve been holding my tongue thus far, but this text is pretty sexist in spots. Hasn’t Kelly been the one risking her neck for the sake of this company all along? Why can’t she be the heir? A product of the times, I suppose. Not even futurists could see beyond their social conditioning. Utopia is a half-baked pipe dream.
49
When he saw government and big business closing in on everyone, he went underground
Allow me to translate: When he saw Google and Google closing in on everyone, he found McLuhan’s reverse potential for capitalism.
He brought in a few men, mechanics, doctors, lawyers, little once-a-week newspapermen from the Middle West. The Company grew. Weapons appeared, weapons and knowledge.
This is starting to sound an awful lot like Atlus Shrugged (Full disclosure: I have never been able to actually finish that whale of a book.). Did Dick have Objectivist sympathies or something? Rethrick certainly seems to.
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