Surrogates: A Cursory Analysis

Set some decades in the future, Surrogates deals with a society in which people live through robots that are beautified versions of themselves. All one has to do is plug into a machine, and their thoughts are transmitted to the “surrogate”, which goes out into the world. As a result of this, crime has dropped dramatically, remarkable social stability has been achieved, and most people seem to be having a good time. There are some holdouts against this new paradigm, however: those who see these surrogates as debased inventions through which people lie to themselves by denying their essential humanity to one another. But these people are in a small minority, however justified they are in their opposition to “surrogacy”.

The extent to which people have come to rely on their surrogates is exemplified by the derogatory term “meat bag”, which is used to depict real people who go out into the world as themselves! This suggests an extreme form of alienation, but to me the more interesting aspect wasn’t so much the alienation resulting from the use of surrogates, but the fact that I could concieve of a future in which such machines would be attractive propositions in the first place. To get to that level, we need a society that already has extreme degrees of alienation. Surrogates are really a metaphor for the alienation that the director of the movie already sees in society, and I think he’s right. Even if crime and other social ills were to be drastically curtailed by the use of surrogates or something like them, I still think that they are a rather monstrous proposition. They would show the utter failure of humanity to come to terms with the conditions of its own existence. To me, a future worth living would be one where genuinely human relations are allowed to come to the fore. Surrogacy, then, is a profound negation of such aspirations, and it represents a dystopian nightmare, whatever the benefits it could bring.

I should note, however, that it seems as though the movie aims to focus on the technological aspects of alienation. Here one can find analogues in today’s world (online chatting, virtual worlds, etc). But in a sense, this is all just a surface manifestation of something deeper. We were already living in a type of surrogate world before the advent of advanced telecommunications. In nominally free societies, one finds material abundance and the persuit of this abundance as a prime motive in life; one finds conformity to what Erich Fromm called the “It”, the monolithic consensus of society, nation and state to which one tries to curry favour to “get by”. The idol of the market has become the God of the nihilist, and its worship the function of modern society. Man’s goals have been subordinated to servicing his own invention, and his own invention places constraints and sub-goals that are anathema to the true realisation of human potential. As from said, we possess great intelligence, but little reason. Thus we relate to one another more as things than as human beings; we sell ourselves, obssess over appearance, and try to have a good time, trying to find in this nexus an anchor point for an affirmation of self, but at the heart of it we are conforming to a profound inhumanity that isn’t really our own. If we see the surrogates as a metaphor not for MSN messenger and Skype, but for alienated man, then the movie takes on a more profound resonance. So while Surrogates is a great movie that I recommend to everyone, I am somewhat wary that people will come away with too narrow a message from it. Yes, technological innovations that exempt us from face-to-face human interactions exacerbate alienation, but they are also themselves a symptom of fundamental social relations that, by their very nature, lead organically to the rise and appeal of alienating instruments. And it’s that something else that is, to me at least, all the more interesting and worth getting to the heart of, because it, far more than any technological device, defines the human content, or lack thereof, of our society.