Alphaville

 

My menu remote flicks through New Wave. Clicking the choose file I enter Alphaville. My identity links me to Alphaville. Already, Alphaville. A is for Eiffel Tower. His film noir mind is an artificial intelligence. Dark streets offer sanctuary to nameless walkers in search of their name below bright lights, big city. Everyone anonymous has a code name, an alias, a password, pin numbers to somewhere north or south they need. They think. Nothing much is explained. No one in Alphaville asks Why. There is only Because. Like watching Jean-Luc Godard, the black-and-white of the Present, Because, retelling the story of Alpha60 sixty years later. Like living with intermittent commercials on this streaming service. Colour bursts a random gunshot. Orange. A nice time to check the laundry cycle, something real, something moist. Only takes a few seconds. Then it’s back to the grainy future. Bright screen, sixties faces. Women here in Alphaville are shapes. They serve the servants of the supermind. Relationships do not develop. They stay in their lab coats. Prostitutes keep to their lines. Functionaries have one function. Like spies and technicians. I want to step away from this place. Away from a computer telling me in smoky basso profondo the story of my day. But then I would be before long keying in codes to reconnect with my very own Alpha60, its googlography, scamtecture and chatbotomies. If, I ask my bloggerama, Eddie Constantine were Agent 86 and Anna Karina  were Agent 99, would we enjoy Alphaville more? Is Professor Von Braun just the latest incarnation of a kooky Kaos ‘mastermind’? When he threatens you with death for feeling, is he being funny? Does his sentient computer system Alpha60 have complete Control of Alphaville the way my life is in the grip of Send-and-Receive? They are smooth and seductive, but computers may be kept at arm’s length. They return me, for all my efforts, an algorithm of appetites. I think. Perhaps 86 was right to delete Von Braun and his symmetrical spectacles. Now 99 can breathe again. She has learnt to say love, out loud, not sotto voce to an unfeeling camera. It’s a caution to us all. There is Why. Speaking poetry is a personal act of memory no computer can imitate. As 86 says, deadpan, “it is the immediate data of consciousness.” Streamatronics, interfacials, gambolygames, shapelishiftishimmerings, and all the other services of our own private Alpha60 cannot speak the data of consciousness to those we know and cherish. Or send a reply that at least tries, a compliment free of compliance. FIN appears romantically, yet as I remote End I stare a while at the black screen, its promise of endless information, artificial infinitude, a supermind my mind must choose to avoid.