J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition in the Age of AI
James Graham Ballard (1930–2009) was a British author who published the short story collection The Atrocity Exhibition in 1970 as an exploration of how human psychology interacted with violence, celebrity, and mass media. The collection was admittedly difficult for me to read through due to its both gratuitous and clinical treatment of its subjects—which it features to the point of describing the genitalia of a female character on one page and then her dismembered body on the next. On other pages, the dismembered bodies of celebrities like Albert Camus and James Dean appear as car crash victims. The passage of time has had little effect on the shock value of this collection due to the enduring iconography of the celebrities involved.
However, the introduction by Hari Kunzru explains that this treatment was meant to be more than shocking. The repetition of car crashes simulates how "the subject, conditioned by repeated exposure to these stimuli ... learns to respond with arousal and fear"(p. xviii). Ballard is describing a type of brainwashing process that the mass media uses to stultify the general public by showing them scenes of violence (e.g. at the time of the collection's writing, the Vietnam War) juxtaposed with images of beautiful celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jayne Mansfield. In fact, the other main character of the book is a female who is treated as being partly composed of all the female celebrities mentioned. This particular treatment would seem quite sexist if not for the fact that the main male character is undergoing psychosis and perceives the female to have died multiple times, or "alternate deaths".
J.G. Ballard's unifying intention behind this story collection was to make a point about how clinically the mass media treats topics which, before industrialization, would have been treated with more gravity. However, that does not mean everyone supported how the collection executed its purpose, especially since those topics included pornography and death. The entire American run of the book was pulped in 1970 due to controversy over its obscenity. Ballard also intended for the book to be viewed as obscene, pushing the boundary of what content could be viewed as art.
The Atrocity Exhibition remains relevant now more than ever. In the age of artificial intelligence, social media algorithms, and short form content, technology users are just as primed to become more addicted as when the collection was published. Users can watch videos of beautiful women dancing next to videos of mass shootings and manage to scroll past both of them. They become desensitized to extreme content both online and in the real world. What is left is a populace that, like how Ballard perceived in his time period, has little will to attempt to change conditions for other people.
Today's generation needs its own form of The Atrocity Exhibition. The problem is, will technology users listen? Many Americans are not even capable of reading at a 6th grade level. One solution would be to create a social media series that details the risks of online addiction and technology in general, like the TV series Black Mirror. Another solution would be writing a similar book series that captures the risks of media-driven desensitization, like The Hunger Games (which was written in response to coverage of the Iraq War). Finally—though this is least likely—the problem could regulate itself through users becoming bored due to desensitization. Then they would gradually seek out analog content and become exposed to the world again.
Whatever the case, it is true that society is heading towards an event of reckoning surrounding AI, just like the psychotic male protagonist of the narrative with regards to mass media. Perhaps AI will replace most workers or create bioweapons that target large population centers. Recently, a former AI researcher has said that AI will have the power to end humanity by 2030. Will we have the power to resist? Or, as the doctor says about our male protagonist, "...[the mass media] has become an expression of the failure of his psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and of his revolt against the present continuum of time and space." (p. 6)
- Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. Fourth Estate, 2014.
*This was not written with the assistance or generation of any AI.