1st Generation Internet Kid
“You’ll have a chance at true freedom—of body and soul.” --Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
In 1981, Jean Baudrillard postulated that we were creating a “hyperreality” where simulations of reality precede and define the real, rendering the real and original indiscoverable. He suggested that had replaced reality with symbols, signs, and media representations.
In 2012, Instagram rose in popularity, and like many by 2014, I became a pretty heavy user of it and witnessed the creation of this “hyperreality.”
At what point did we just stop giving a damn about our friends?
In the 2013 film Ender’s Game, child prodigy Ender Wiggins is recruited with a bunch of other youngsters and trained into fighting what he is led to believe is a formidable enemy, an alien species called the Formics. Ender is chosen because he is neither too violent nor too kind. Much of their training proceeds through simulation. During his training, he starts having visions that lead him to believe that the Formics might be an intelligent species with a desire for communication. Too late he realizes that the simulations are real and that he has ordered the genocide of an entire species.
I’m not sure what I like so much about this film. Maybe it is that due to the conditions of my upbringing I can relate quite a bit to Ender. Because I had a very inquisitive brain, I was constantly put in new situations and presented with new challenges. My team existed before Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok when a generation of kids discovered each other through message boards, game chats, and revealed their stats. I’m not entirely sure what a 1st generation Internet kid has to say about the simulacra we have created now.
I think about my upbringing and this idea that life is a game we are training in and how often we are presented with the idea of wiping out the alien species that ‘poses a formidable threat,’ and I think of another piece of entertainment, the banned book An Ember in the Ashes. In it, the jinn have sought their vengeance on the Scholars by giving power to the Martial Empire to lord over them after the Scholars tricked the jinn and lesser creatures into giving up their mystical secrets and wiped them out. Yet Aspirant Elias has no desire to become powerful or cruel like his mother and grandfather or rule over the Scholars. He wishes to be free of his fate or imagines if ruling the Martials would live as equals with the Scholars. When put to the test of loyalty, he is unable to kill the Scholar spy and only wishes he had chosen his own death before killing his own men to prove his strength. As he steps into the darkness, escaping into the catacombs with the Scholar spy, he realizes those are his first steps into freedom.
