I would like to share this gem of an interview by Paul M. Samson with the legendary science fiction writer and philosopher Philip K. Dick from 1981.
I often shake my metaphorical (and digital) old man's walking stick at the youngsters of today because of their unhealthy Facebook, Twitter, selfie, social media addictions, and other related narcissistic behavior. After such gesticulations, I surrender to the fun finds made possible by these Internets.
Philip K. Dick had mixed feelings about the movie Blade Runner (he disliked early versions of the work in progress). In his talk with Samson, Dick also shares his disgust and contempt for Hollywood.
[I doubt that he would be pleased with the TV adaptation of his book The Man in the High Castle.]
He is not alone in that sentiment: many artists are aghast at how the Culture Industry distorts, misrepresents, and ruins their work, repackaging it for the lowest common denominator that is profit seeking from the masses' approval.
Dick's upsetness is not a surprise
It is his observation about the public, ethics, and human behavior that I find so moving and incisive.
Philip K. Dick suggests that the replicants/synthetic people in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? represent defective people:
I was studying the Nazi mentality...I discovered that although these people were highly intelligent they were definitely deficient in some manner in appropriate affect and appropriate emotion that would accompany the intellectual processes...I became conscious of the possibility of a very highly intelligent human who was emotionally so defective that the word human could not be applied to him. And I use this in my writing in such terms as android and robot. I am really referring to someone who is psychologically defective, malfunctioning, or pathological human being...For me the word ‘android’ is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way.
Powerful.
In a United States that has lost (if it ever had one) its collective ethics and morality after 9/11, embraces and cheers on torture of the innocent as national policy, offers up media and popular culture that fetes sociopaths such as Chris Kyle in American Sniper, wants to kill the "useless eaters", has an institutional political party in the Tea Party GOP that is white supremacist, detached from reality and possessed by a hallucinatory ideology, thug cops kill black and brown people for sport and with impunity, and where human empathy and decency across the colorline (and on both sides of it) is treated as something exceptional--as opposed to the governing rule for our behavior--Philip K. Dick's vision of the future-now is damning and prescient.
Science fiction is a genre that through speculation and dreaming engages questions about the nature of "the political" and human society. Philip K. Dick was a master of the craft. American dystopia is the present. It is not some undiscovered country or imagined future as dreamed and built by science fictions writers of decades-past.
Description should not preclude action and corrective. How do we repair the now?