Recap
Kelly, a seemingly hedonistic party girl, has a meet cute with Yorkie, a shy newcomer to San Junipero. San Junipero is a digital afterlife which the living can only visit for a limited time before getting kicked out for a week. For Kelly, San Junipero is a temporary way to have some fun, but for Yorkie, it’s the solution to actually experience “life” after spending decades as a bedridden quadriplegic. Their opposing viewpoints become a conflict, but in the end Kelly is both buried with her family and, for some reason, also inserted into an adjacent server to Yorkie who had already “passed” for some time.
On the beauty of impermanence
I subscribe to the Japanese aesthetic mujō, rather impermanence. Compare seeing fireworks to looking at a picture of it or watching a Broadway musical in person versus watching a bootleg cam, living life versus playing Second Life. There really is no comparison.
It is a multi-user virtual environment. It doesn’t have points or scores; it doesn’t have winners or losers. ~ Dwight Shrute
Wes even talks about how he prefers the authentic connection he felt with Kelly compared to the “like dead” locals referring to a group of vapid party goers, the worst of whom end up at Quagmire chasing more and more kinky pursuits to feel anything as their tolerance increases.
Oh, it has losers. ~ Jim Halpert
San Junipero is a twist on Neverland, reclaiming the youth that’s wasted on the young. I see the appeal of freedom with no consequences, not aging, completely designing your own appearance, but I couldn’t do it. Contrary to what Yorkie was saying while feeling up the car, it’s not real. None of it is real. It’s just a land of arrested development, a nostalgic echo of glory days past—or that never were—where the locals are townies who never really left high school.
Doesn’t anyone remember the Matrix?
They took our jobs
But let’s be real, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If automation is killing low-skilled jobs, this technology would kill knowledge workers’ jobs.
Other than the server costs (and buying equivalent carbon offsets for the PR-obsessed companies), there’s no salary. No health insurance. No travel expenses. No benefits. These people who want to cling to “existence” are the “ideal” workforce. That just sounds like slavery but with extra steps. Holding being or not over the heads of an ever-growing population, there’s no way something like San Junipero would function at scale.
For some similar viewing, Amazon’s Upload, an entire series predicated on the existence of competing digital afterlives, actually touches on the effects of capitalism like microtransactions and rate limiting.
On five nines (or 99.999% uptime)
Admittedly, I work more in Cloud networking than storage. Regardless, one of the key points of “the Cloud” is not to have a single point of failure, which means having multiple replicas and back ups across multiple regions or zones.
Are these backups continually overwritten as your primary consciousness copy lives their best life in San Junipero? Or do they continue to be versioned, sequentially filed away in cold storage? Are the backups conscious? Which replica is really you?
More so, during some upgrades, clusters/nodes are spun up then deleted to avoid downtime. This would be like duplicating then eliminating worlds. Are people on the San Junipero lifecycle teams creating cataclysmic events with every infrastructure update?
Discussion question
Leading question is leading, but which is more selfish, dying without uploading your consciousness or expecting someone to commit to an eternal purgatory so you’re not alone? Which would you pick?
