The theme of the third one-way street bookstore literature festival is "a generation is coming". This speech responded to this theme for the first time, and reviewed the personal history of this generation of creators and the changes that our society is undergoing from the perspective of "youth". Everyone's speeches are concerned about the new technology era, how the arrival of video culture shapes the emotional structure of a generation, and how fixed concepts such as "literature", "film", "countryside" and "women" have new meanings in the highly mobile trend of the times.
The topic of Chen Qiufan's speech is "Literary Practice in the Age of Technical Anxiety", in which the word "practice" is related to the recent rising trend of Buddhism. He believes that this playful expression actually reflects the anxiety of this era. With the rapid development of science and technology and the unpredictable future, this anxiety is natural. People who are engaged in writing must also face this anxiety and fight it with literature.
The following is a record of Chen Qiufan's speech:
Hello, everyone, I'm Chen Qiufan, and I'm honored to come to the Literature Festival of One-way Street Bookstore to talk about the fear and pain of this generation. I think this topic is particularly good. In my opinion, the topics concerned by one-way street, the articles written and even everyone in them are particularly painful, which is a particularly rare quality in this era.
In the past, everyone may have been swiped by one sentence. The circle of friends and WeChat Weibo have proved our judgment on this era from another side. The word is Buddhism.
Anything, yes, it doesn't matter. Don't fight or rob, accept your fate. It's not just the post-90s generation, it seems that everyone is laughing and laughing overnight. Don't fight for anything just because you really don't want it, or just because you can't win it, or because you really see through the world of mortals, or because you don't know what you want and can't see the direction you can work for. There is great anxiety of the times behind "Buddha nature", and escaping into an empty door cannot eliminate these anxieties, which reflects the different psychological coping mechanisms of each generation for this lack.
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, realistic anxiety is a kind of emotional and behavioral response mode formed by human beings in the process of evolution to cope with uncertainty. And this uncertainty has been infinitely magnified in today's era. Why? Because of economic, political, social and cultural reasons, I believe all the teachers here are much more professional than me. Today, I mainly talk about how technology makes this era more anxious.
As early as 1949, Shannon's information theory had proposed that information was used to eliminate uncertainty. Although this definition is simple, it has laid the cornerstone of our entire information society. Today, our life is full of data and bits, but the human brain is not much different from the Stone Age tens of thousands of years ago. It is still an information processing system based on physical transcendental knowledge that has evolved for hundreds of millions of years. Most of our thinking is completed by a powerful system I controlled by emotions and biological instinct, together with another less powerful system II, which can collect, analyze and make decisions by using bounded rationality. They use different brain regions, and it often takes us a lot of effort to make system 2 override system 1 and make a so-called rational judgment. Even such judgments are sometimes far less accurate than simple machines.
For the simplest example, as long as everyone's face is turned by 180 degrees, the human brain will immediately become face blind, but for machines, this is just a piece of cake to transform coordinate systems, let alone deal with some high-dimensional data models. Therefore, this seemingly information-rich and even explosive era is actually extremely unfriendly to the human brain. The more information we get, the more noise, errors, distortions and errors we can't digest and correct through some programs. They precipitate, become so-called cognitive overload and information overload, become our anxiety itself, and affect our judgment and choice of action in the future.
If this is the amplification of the uncertainty of human brain prediction in the technological age, then another aspect of uncertainty is even more deadly, and that is to explain the uncertainty of the world. In this matter, not only ordinary people but also scientists are anxious.
At NIPS, the just-concluded global top conference on artificial intelligence and machine learning, Ali Rahimi, a senior engineer working for Google, won the "Time Test" paper award for a paper published 10 years ago. As the name implies, this award is used to reward academic achievements that have stood the test of time. It stands to reason that you should be very happy to win the prize, but Ali, an honest and frank boy, made a cruel remark at the award ceremony, which stirred up a thousand waves and shocked the whole industry at once. She said, "artificial intelligence is alchemy." As we all know, alchemy is notorious in history. Although objectively promoted the development of metallurgy, prevention, medical care and other fields. For a long time, people believed that leeches could cure diseases, turn stone into gold, and even extract elixir. Ali's sentence means that in the current field of artificial intelligence research, everyone is using many seemingly very effective skills, which can improve the ability of machines to solve problems, but we know nothing about the principles and working principles behind them. Everything is like alchemy, or more directly, metaphysics, but everyone is still struggling in sturm und drang.
From this great discussion on the standard of truth in the AI circle, we can also deeply understand the anxiety of scientists in this era. Technology is developing so fast that we can't fully understand it. This reminds me of a literary theory concept-difference. Yi Yan is from Derrida. There are many theoretical concepts of humanities that I didn't understand until many years after I left school. For example, McLuhan's "media is information", for example, Kristeva's "intertextuality", its effectiveness often goes beyond the academic context and enters the category of daily experience. In Derrida's view, "presence" as the destination of meaning no longer exists, and the definite meaning of symbols is extended layer by layer, spreading in all directions like seeds, so there is no center at all.
In the current era of technology, any expression of technology can only rely on images, metaphors and even literature, and the core of technology itself is unspeakable, that is, the existence of pure numbers and ideas, artificial intelligence, gravitational waves, quantum physics and graphene. Even after popular science, these technologies still have a cognitive threshold for the public, which is still a fog and even brings deeper misunderstanding. A few days ago, a director told me that after reading the sentence "The whole universe is flashing for me" in "Three-body", my mind was suddenly filled with the cool vision of Hollywood blockbusters. Later, under the guidance of experts, I realized that the cosmic microwave background radiation was not what he thought. And whether artificial intelligence will rule mankind is a bad disagreement, but it is also inciting panic and creating anxiety.
Can we alleviate the anxiety of this era? I have been asking myself, because writing science fiction, I often feel that what I write is too objective, and I want to return to the source that the original literature can bring us. As we said before, the cognition of the human brain is limited. One of my teachers put forward a concept of "happiness", which I think is very suitable for literature. He combined cognitive science with positive psychology, thinking that since people's consciousness and self-cognition can be layered according to different time dimensions. For example, our spiritual things can be divided into atomic and molecular activities, and the corresponding happiness can also be distinguished according to the time dimension. He cited three dimensions, and I think literature has brought me happiness in my life:
The first is the sense of transcendence sublimated on the time scale of seconds.
The second is the concentration sublimated from the time dimension of minute and hour.
The third is the significance of sublimation beyond the time dimension.
Especially in the field of science fiction, I feel that these three levels of happiness overlap and collide with each other, and the happiness and satisfaction brought to me enable me to resist the anxiety brought by this era.
Looking back, this era is also unfriendly to writers. We can think about it. In the traditional era, we don't ask an author to be good-looking, articulate, play and film. In this era, I find it particularly ridiculous that people want the author to be an all-round player and feel that the author has been placed on an unbearable weight.
On the other hand, the theme of writing in this era has been greatly challenged. We used to write a lot of serial murders, but now in this era, there are 654.38+76 billion surveillance cameras in the country, covering every corner you can touch. We should have the most advanced surveillance system in the world called Skynet. I wonder if this is inspired by Terminator. Not long ago, a British journalist tried to challenge such a system. After he entered his identity information into the system, he escaped for only seven minutes, was locked by the system, and then the police took him away. In this day and age, it's hard to imagine how a person can commit a serial murder and get something literary from it. This seems unimaginable to me. This is a question of "how to write". In this era, we rely too much on search engines, and search engines themselves are a process in which information and discourse are constantly different. When I search for A, B will appear, and when I search for B, C will appear. This process is endless spread. In the words of my friend Li, in fact, information overload is the process of artificially creating anxiety to fight anxiety. Because it will make you feel that you are doing something serious instead of doing nothing, but in fact you have collected thousands of writing materials, but you are reluctant to write the first sentence of your novel, and now you will get into such a dilemma. How to write?
Let's go back to the third question, "For whom". In the traditional literary production process, this problem does not actually exist. Who likes to read your book when it goes out? At most, some readers write a few letters. Maybe paper documents will be sent to you. It may have been several years since the transfer. At present, many authors throw their works on an online platform, and there will be a lot of comments in a few seconds. Some people say that this is too sci-fi to understand, and some people say that you are not sci-fi. I've already read it. Every author will fall into an anxious scene and don't know how to judge his own works, because he lacks a standard, continuous and effective literature.
The last question is "for whom". In the past, we often said that we were writing for ourselves, or to be more friendly, we were writing for readers. But now the problem is different. I know many authors. Two days ago, he was seen by big companies and big capitals, bought it and adapted it into movies and scripts, and got a very rich remuneration. When he wrote his next article, he fell into anxiety. He doesn't know. Whether to write for yourself, for readers, or for big film companies and capital is an anxiety in the IP era in which we live, which leads to a state of pain and love in the writing process.
How should we face this anxiety? I think we can only return to the realm where literature can bring us three kinds of happiness, pleasure, concentration and meaning. Literature is a practice that makes us smile. There should be a Buddhist expression pack here. Thank you.