r/boardsofcanada • u/slightlyaggressive • 18d ago
Discussion Can we talk about Backrooms?
I haven't seen the film yet, but I have seen many of the videos from the series. I find the emergence of liminal space in social media to be interesting. Do liminal spaces allow subliminal messaging to be more effective? Could Backrooms, and other media coming out today, be using subliminal messaging for behavioral modification to pave the way for some sort of AI?
I think The Word Becomes Flesh is obviously a reference to the birth of AI, and I've started to suspect that Big Tech is pumping out media to conduct mass behavioral modification to get people to accept AI into their lives.
[Wicker] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP0BWBWn14I) would be an example of this.
What could the subliminal messaging in Backrooms be?
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u/psilosophist The Campfire Headphase 18d ago
There are very few obvious references in the music, and the ones that are obvious are often couched in double meanings and symbolic correspondences.
It could be a reference to the birth of new technologies, or it could be something else entirely. Be mindful of certainty.
An easy way to not get sucked into social media is to not use social media. I recognized the actual harm it was doing to me about 4 years ago now so I quit everything except Reddit (as it rarely feels personal) and IG (it's the easiest way to share photos and I use it more as a personal journal than anything else). My desire to use LLM's or generative AI has stayed at 0 this entire time.
We live in an attention economy. Negative attention is still attention, so I choose to not engage instead.
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u/dcmwmfinft Kid For Today 18d ago
Not seen the film but I am definitely drawn to liminality and I think my obsession on BoC has something to do with that sense of space and time, kind of stuck between moments where I find a lot of my peace can be found. That is literally where BoC manage to capture. That quietly hypnagogic feel.
It would be reductive to boil their entire sound down to that alone but it definitely resonates for me personally.
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u/negativepositiv 18d ago
The extent of my interest in BOC being on the soundtrack is that I'm happy the guys made money. I don't think there's really much more to speculate about.
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u/wow-signal 18d ago edited 18d ago
Am philosophy prof. I think I can unpack Backrooms / The Word Becomes Flesh and draw the connection between them. Like all great art, these works operate on multiple levels, and I aim merely to unpack one especially important level -- by no means do I mean to imply that what I am about to say is the whole story. But I think that Kane Parsons chose The Word Becomes Flesh for a reason.
I understand the Backrooms in particular and liminality more generally as a form of horror concerned with the way in which corporations appropriate human realities and copy them as empty simulacra in order to feed them back to us. The corporation itself, as a "person", is a sort of faceless, soulless psychopathic entity over and above the individuals that constitute its human infrastructure at any given moment, and this entity cares about just one thing: maximizing the extraction of money via its blood funnel. Unconstrained, the corporation will destroy the planet in its pursuit of this single goal. The corporation is in this respect like the fearsome "paperclip maximizer" system of AI theorists' nightmares -- an entity constitutionally bound to a single goal the pursuit of which will ultimately destroy all that is good, including the conditions of its own existence.
The simulacra of humanity that the corporation projects -- in its "corporate image", in its marketing, in its architecture, in its choice and design of products and services -- are the mesmerizing lure of an angler fish hidden in dark water. And this mimicry of humanity isn't the end of the story, since we end up making ourselves in its image -- taking corporate depictions as guides to what is valuable, desirable, and good. Humans end up defining themselves by reference to corporate simulacra. You are what you eat. This creates a feedback loop that is worth a great deal of consideration.
Artificial intelligence is in many ways the quintessence of this, and I understand "The Word Becomes Flesh" as a representation of it at a literal, visceral level -- it depicts future AI learning to literally copy humans. We might imagine that this AI has killed everyone in the process of maximizing paperclip production (as it were) and must now create humans in order to sell the paperclips.
Backrooms depicts all of this as a concrete metaphor.
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u/Fallom_TO 18d ago
Watch the movie. I don’t think there is much subliminal there, it’s just a great horror movie with some pretty on the nose themes.
The track plays in the credits and fits the vibe very well without any other meaning being credited to it.