(Text/Yang Shiyang)
Chen Li sang in "Immortal", "If everyone meets everyone after death, then what charm is there in death." "Uploading a Newborn" tells roughly such a story. Death is no longer an end, an end, and a farewell, but a new beginning. The soul is immortal, and the feeling is forever. The dead and the dead meet each other, and the dead and the living are no longer separated from the yin and yang. The soul and memory are uploaded to the cloud and become a string of digital numbers. These souls can live in "Haoli In the virtual world of "Zen·Lake View", you can enjoy the paradise life like a luxury resort in the world. Everything is virtual, but everything is so real, retaining the physical form and all desires, but time and the future are eternal. All of this can be understood as endless enjoyment, or it can be understood as permanent imprisonment, depending on which angle you look at. The electronic program finally showed a tangible paradise, and the back of that paradise.
If there is an analogy, then "Uploading Freshman" is a brighter version of "Black Mirror", but it only has a more relaxed narrative tone than the latter. It is humorous, funny, and stuffed into a large section of love scenes. He is arguing with gag, but the torture directed at the back is still as cold as "Black Mirror". It really resembles the story of "San Junipello" in "Black Mirror", with digital solutions to the things behind, the human desire to say goodbye to death, and the endless problems derived from this ultimate dream.
The writing method of "Uploading Freshman" is a standard science fiction/dystopian narrative template. One clue is about the investigation of an unsettled case, and the other clue is about and serving this while showing all the weirdness, novelty and fear of the future world. landscape. One is responsible for advancing the story line, and the other is responsible for presenting the world view. The protagonist Nathan is a partner of a start-up company, a very talented and handsome programmer from a poor background. They developed a software that allows people to upload themselves, which has touched huge interests. One night, he died in a car accident caused by a malfunction of his own self-driving car. His rich second-generation girlfriend is a control freak and uploaded it to the famous "Haolizen Lake View" at the moment of his death. In this way, Nathan's death is eliminated and he can still enjoy "life". And his girlfriend still won't lose this man. There, he adapts a little bit to the digital world that is also real and illusory, but at the same time falls in love with the customer service girl in the virtual world, and his own death is becoming more complicated and confusing.
Nowadays, each of us lives in a digital world. Those settings that talk about artificial intelligence, immersive experiences, etc., are becoming more and more difficult to impress the audience. To some extent, we live on a line that is tangent to the world of science fiction. , Which is increasingly testing the ability to present science fiction/dystopian stories. "Uploading a new life" is indeed a setting that is not new, and what is even more embarrassing is that it is difficult to have any surprising setting now. After all, the future has come, and everyone is the most demanding science fiction story critic. Home, but in this context, "Uploading New Life" still presents those future landscapes in a very interesting way. It uses some unusually simple ways to render that future world-the four seasons and seasons that can be adjusted and selected by the knob. The weather; those surrounding environments that seem real and undoubtedly but always find flaws; under the attack of bugs, the perfect image of the human body degenerates into a man with a rough comic style... The director deliberately chose a kind of cute, humorous and even childish The way to present all of this is an ingenious way of trying to catch it. If it is deliberately cool, if it fails to meet the standard, it is destined to cause group ridicule, but putting down your body can effectively resolve people's harshness. In addition to the writing about the strange landscape of the future cloud world, "Uploading New Life" still ambushes many serious topics between those funny and love. The customer service staff randomly fiddle with the uploaded person; the tension between the uploader and the living. The cruel class stratification in the cloud of the virtual world; the darkness, exploitation, and cruelty hidden behind the paradise that seems to be filled with milk and honey... I have to say that this story has always had an obvious tendency to social criticism, but only However, they deliberately do not expand. They are clicked until they are clicked. They appear briefly, and then disappear behind the bright and dazzling digital world, just like the mirror image and metaphor of the current real world-you can see poverty, helplessness and despair, but the perspective Immediately, I will be attracted by the radiant consumerism exhibition, forget everything that is gloomy, and even doubt whether it really exists. If "Big Brother" comes to this generation, he will also learn to change a set of words. After all, compared to the iron and blood in "1984", isn't the methodology in "Brave New World" easier to manipulate and practice? There is no need to force, a lot of people take the bait automatically, take the initiative to cooperate, and think that they are free. The cost of "1984" is too high, and "Brave New World" has an obvious profit model, isn't it?
Some of the torture in "Uploading New Life" is indeed softened and diluted by the love story, but it still retains some sharp things. For example, the core part is about memory and death. To some extent, memory defines a person. It determines who we are. The deletion, implantation and tampering of memory means the elimination of a person’s spiritual meaning. From a certain perspective, memory is almost equivalent to the soul. . And this story is to show people that if memory can be refined into numbers and programs, after it initially throbs humans, it is destined to cause irreversible disasters immediately. Death is another topic, it is about the "finality" of human beings. All human desires, dreams, physical and spiritual advancement and laziness lie in our affirming that we know our own limitations, the end of the life progress bar is waiting there, and we use this as a measure to measure the scale of all things, but memory and The uploading of the soul to the cloud has banned the end of life and turned the finite into infinity. It seems to have fulfilled a kind of ultimate dream that mankind dreams of, but because it cannot resolve the inherent conflicts of human nature, it has increasingly plunged people into a distorted situation. What's more, whose life is the life after uploading, whether it belongs to the uploader himself or the survivor who paid for maintenance in reality? Is the uploaded person a digital asset or a real person? There is almost no answer to all of this. If all of this comes true, then the boundary of life and death will be broken, memory can be tampered with at will, and the spirit can be uploaded, what will the world be like? It was a beautiful freak, a wonderful nightmare, and a dark new world that people were destined to strive for before they got it, and that they would shun it after they got it.
(This article was first published in the Beijing Youth Daily column)
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