People Want Oblivion
And some believe they are born to build it for them.
In the Martin household, we try not to keep more than a couple of streaming service subscriptions at any given time. Disney+ is sort of required right now with two little girls who love princesses and Bluey, and so we go back and forth subscribing and unsubscribing from Netflix. But recently I saw that Netflix acquired the rights to stream all of the James Bond movies, and I decided to try to watch as many as I could. I had only seen one or two of the Pierce Brosnan Bond movies, and only about 1.5 of the Daniel Craig ones. I set off on my Bond journey with the Craig movies, which I recently completed, and I hope to start back at the beginning now with the Sean Connery ones. I really enjoyed the Craig ones a lot!
People Want Oblivion
Toward the end of the last Daniel Craig James Bond movie, No Time to Die, Bond confronts the villain Lyutsifer Safin1 (Rami Malek). In the confrontation, Bond is attempting to talk Safin out of his grand plan to infect the world with his biological warfare weapon. Bond talks with Safin about how neither of them really had a chance to live before their families were taken from them, and that the millions of people Safin intends to kill shouldn’t be subjected to such evil.
Safin responds to Bond like this:
The thing that no one wants to admit is that most people want things to happen to them.
We tell each other lies about the fight for free will and independence when we don’t really want that.
We want to be told how to live, and then die when we are not looking.
People want oblivion, and a few of us are born to build it for them.
Here we have a fictional villain delivering some nonfictional truth.
We live in a time in which So Much Happens that we cannot help but be subject to things happening to us. Even the most offline person has a hard time avoiding oblivion.
No matter how much we try to avoid being “current events” men or women, it feels increasingly hard not to be smacked in the face with some kind of Horror of the Day.
Brokenness is everywhere, and it happens to all of us in one way or another. The sad reality is that many of us just let it happen. We see the train coming down the tracks and we don’t let ourselves get out of the way. We, as Safin says, “tell each other lies” about our desire for independence and free will without actually acting like we want those things.
We talk about the desire to scroll feeds less and go outside more, and yet our screen time reports continue to testify against us.
We talk about working for change and resisting injustices—signaling our virtues or carrying around a hollow husk of optimism—only fall in line with the status quo and not have the courage to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
As much as we say otherwise, our lives often reflect those of people who want to coast along in comfort, hoping to avoid the injustices or issues we detest instead of doing something about them.
Safin hits the nail on the head when he concludes, “People want oblivion, and a few of us are born to build it for them.”
Here I see oblivion as clearly analogous to our current cultural posture of scrolling ourselves to death—a posture we simultaneously eviscerate and embrace.
Oblivion drops the world and all of its problems into our pockets and only provides us with the illusion of doing something about it. Oblivion makes us grand spectators, deciding to consume the lives of others instead of cultivating lives of our own.
Silicon Valley executives recognize that the people want oblivion, and they believe they are the ones who have been born to build it for them.
The Trough of Oblivion
Over the last couple of decades, a group of brilliant psychologists and computer scientists dedicated their lives to setting up carefully curated troughs of oblivion to be consumed such that we feel infinitely informed, endlessly entertained, and unwittingly enslaved. Our attention is worth hundreds of billions of dollars per quarter.
Invading the core of the human heart and swapping beauty with oblivion is a profitable venture.
When we passively consume content on our feeds, we perfectly embody this spirit of people who want things to happen to them, as Safin describes. We verify our identities (even as we forget who we are), open our phones, approach the blue-light trough, and keep our noses down, consuming until time runs out or we begin to feel ill.
Eventually, we fattened livestock have consumed so much from the trough of oblivion that we can be harvested. But the beautiful profitability of it all, is that when our attention and data are butchered from our selves, we continue living, unlike other butchered livestock. By giving ourselves over to troughs of oblivion, we endure a kind of death, even as we yet live.
Feeding from the trough of oblivion isn’t free, even if it never hits our wallets.
Somehow when we finally find the courage to lift our heads from the trough and see the beauty of the night sky or the promise of open fields, we squint with skepticism. What might be out there that we cannot control?
We continue to consume out of fear of being consumed. The trouble is we run headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We want oblivion. We want to be told how to live and how to think and how to spend and how to believe…and then die when we least expect it. We clamor for free will and independence bound to feeds by chains we purchased ourselves, only able to be freed by keys we’ve willfully misplaced.
Life is meant to be lived, not consumed. And so, by consuming, we ourselves are consumed. Safin is right: we do want oblivion, and we’ve no shortage of people who believe they were born to build it for us.
Some quick research online shows that Safin was panned as a pretty lame Bond villain back when the movie was initially released and reviewed, but my simple mind thought he was interesting, and this exchange was a bit more philosophically robust than what I typically expect between an action movie hero and villain.