Human Sounds and the Obscenity of Information

Abstract

Miniaturized people, including Damon, retain their deep voices, their perceptual ranges and acuity, and their sensory proprioception; they feel no change of atmospheric pressure, gain no insight into the newly massified world around them, and can still engage with their unminiaturized human interlocutors at will. To be sure, it now seems unsurprising for a postmodern philosopher in the 1980s to signal as casualties the principles of a reality beyond the play of appearances, the existence of unique individual subjects, claims for a truth or a metaphysics that persists. Dystopian rhetoric aside, Baudrillard’s claim that simulation is built on a world of code has proven influential. It asserts that contemporary culture can be coded into ones and zeros, that “digitality is among people. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, and objects in their legibility.