Monsters from the Id

we are living on the forbidden planet

In the 1956 science fiction film "Forbidden Planet" an expedition from the "United Planets" travels in a starship to the planet Altair IV in hopes of discovering the fate of a scientific team sent there twenty years previously. They find that the team's leader, Dr. Morbius, and his beautiful daughter Altaira are the only survivors, the rest of the team having been killed by a mysterious monster.

Morbius shows the explorers his discoveries: the planet was inhabited by a species of high achievement--the Krell--who survived for millions of years and then vanished without a trace 200,000 years ago, leaving behind an empty world full of machines of unknown purpose, including a gigantic nuclear-powered complex that is still in operation, deep beneath the ground.

To appreciate what I’m talking about here I encourge you to watch the three-minute clip of the climax linked at the top of this post.

The film has notable similarities to Shakespeare's The Tempest: a powerful magician with beautiful daughter marooned in a place inhabited by strange powers, rediscovered by people from the outside world.

But for every Ariel there is a Caliban: as the leaden dialog in the scene I've linked here shows, the Krell's great machine allowed them to turn thought in to action, but the source of all thought is the untamed subconscious, seething with anger and hatred and lust. Unfiltered by any intermediary, the power of the Krell's machine allows the Id of each individual to manifest, resulting in chaos, death, and destruction.

Does that sound familiar?

I found the screenplay and did a quick re-write of this scene, edited to conform to the film, which doesn't follow it precisely (this is a good thing... the screenplay is even more clunky than what the actors did with it). Just before he dies the ship's physician, "Doc" has told Adams--the starship captain--that what's killing them is "monsters from the Id", which means nothing to Adams:

Adams: Morbius, what is "the Id"?

Morbius: Young man! My daughter is planning a foolish action... and she will be terribly punished--

Adams: What is the Id?

Morbius: Id Id Id Id Id! It's a... it's an obsolete term, I'm afraid-- once used to describe the elementary basis of the subconscious mind.

Adams: Monsters from the Id.

Morbius: Huh?

Adams: Monsters from the subconscious. Of course, that's what Doc meant.

Morbius! The big machine-- ten billion multi-core servers connected by hundreds of thousands of kilometres of fibre optic cables-- enough power for a whole population of creative geniuses! Operated by remote control!-- Morbius! Operated by the electromagnetic impulses of individual Krell brains tapping out words on keyboards!

Morbius: To what purpose?

Adams: In return, this ultimate machine would instantaneously project information to any point on the planet-- in any format they might imagine For ANY purpose, Morbius. Creation, manipulation, by mere thought!

Morbius: Why haven't I seen it all along?

Adams: But like you the Krell forgot one deadly danger-- their own subconsicous hate and lust for destruction.

Morbius: The beast. The mindless primitive! Even they must have evolved from that beginning.

Adams: And so those mindless beasts had access to a machine that could never be shut down! Too much depended on it! The secret devil of every soul on the planet-- all set free at once, to loot, to maim, and take revenge, Morbius, and kill!

Morbius: The poor Krell! After a few decades of peace and prosperity they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.

Yes, young man. All very convincing -- but for one obvious fallacy. The last Krell died a century ago, but, as we both know, there is still a living monster at large.

Adams: Your mind refuses to face the conclusion.

Morbius: What do you mean?

Robexa: Morbius... Morbius!

Morbius: What?

Robexa: CNN has a new story on how Donald Trump is sure to win the next election even though he has the support of barely more than half of Republicans in the primaries and is obviously suffering from senile dementia which causes him to continually refer to Barack Obama as the current president and also the candidate he beat in 2016. They are asking if there is any point in Democrats even showing up at the polls in 2024 and shouldn't we just let the trump show run for another season as it would be great for ratings. NBC is asking if 'from the river to the sea' is actually a genocidal slogan or just a perfectly understandable way to increase click-through to Hamas fund-raising sites. And the Guardian is carrying full coverage of Vladimir Putin's speech insisting that Ukraine has always been part of Russia and Taiwan has always been part of China... it is repeating on an endless loop along with videos showing covid was a hoax, mild inconveniences and short school closures three years ago are the cause of persistently high excess mortality today even in jurisdictions that did not have them, and how clean air causes cancer. There are are ads for the new Earth Elastic which will prevent you from falling off the edge of the planet, which according to GPT-88 is flat.

Morbius: I need to go catch up on all that, Adams. I'm sorry, but you're wrong. There are no more Krell. There are only humans here now.

Robexa: Something is approaching from the south-west. It is now quite close.

=====

When I've suggested this idea in the past it has been met with complete incomprehension. Near as I can tell, nobody gets it, and I'm not entirely sure why. Forbidden Planet is the story of a technologically capable, educated, sophisticated, world-spanning society that empowers its individual members to actualize their unfiltered thoughts, impulses, and desires, and it destroys them.

If you can't see that as an entirely appropriate metaphor for the modern internet, I'd love it if you can explain why in the comments.

Trivial differences in detail are trivial. A machine that projects matter rather than a machine that induces action in others is a trivial difference: both have the potential for great good--their design purpose--and also potential for enormous destructive effect: their actual use. Using one thing to stand in for another is how metaphors work: pointing out that there are differences is nothing but the assertion, "Yes, it's a metaphor!" That's not an argument against the proposition: "The Krell's machine and the fate of their society is a good metaphor for the modern internet and its ongoing social consequences." It's an affirmation of it.

Nor is the correctness of the psychology at issue here. "The Id" as a psychological construct is entirely passe'. So what? Everyone still knows what it means, and the atavistic impulses it inadequately represents are still real.

Nor the the existence or non-existence of a collective unconscious relevant: the Krell were destroyed by monsters from individuals, which is why the current monster, responding primarily to Morbius, is behaving as it is.

The fact that it’s physically impossible to fly using wings of feathers held together by wax does not make the story of Icarus irrelevant: it’s what makes it universal. It’s about disatrous ambition, not flying by flapping your arms.

Look around you. If you can't see the Monsters from the Id running loose, maybe yours is one of them. I have no doubt mine is.

In the movie the solution to the problem is to destroy the planet, but Captain Adams still acknowledges that humanity will head down the same path, albeit over a timescale of millions of years. We know now that that timescale was outlandishly long: decades, not thousands of millennia, were all that were required to go from the "clystrons" of the movie (which were an actual thing) to the crypto and large language model scams, cancel culture, fake news, and actual insurrection against democracy in the United States driven entirely by Id-like emotional and behavioural disregulation... all enabled by the internet, which we can't just shut down because we've devised systems from banking to airline bookings to inventory control that are completely dependent on it.

Fortunately, we don't have to employ Hollywood solutions from half a century ago when it comes to real-world problems.

Regulating the internet is possible. China has managed to impose regulations that are far beyond anything required to tame the monsters from the Id.

My own preferred approach is to require any corporation running any form of social media, comments section, or similar to impose a 12 hour delay on any reply. That's the whole of it.

My personal bet is that it would filter out at least half the current badness, and in particular defang the virtual flash mob that is responsible for the worst excesses.

One could go further, and require that after a 12 hour delay users be asked to actively approve their reply before it goes live.

Adding friction can be beneficial: in the age of steam-trains mechanical governors were used to regulate engine speed, but as manufacturing processes improved they became increasingly unstable. It turned out that a bit of friction was necessary to damp their inherent instability, and that friction had once been provided naturally by the loose tolerances of older units. Adding it back in artificially solved the problem.

Regulation of this form is entirely consistent with "free market" principles, as it would be aimed at corporations, which do not exist in free markets. Since corporations require intervention by the Nanny State to even exist, there is no contradiction with the state regulating them to ensure they behave in ways consistent with the public good.

I don't expect this proposal to have much traction: it is simple, minimal, technically simple to implement (although paid liars from Big Tech would likely claim otherwise) and easily adjusted. It's a single number: the number of hours a reply or comment is delayed by. But since it's simple it provides no particular opportunity or advantage for anyone to increase their own power, status, or wealth, and those are the only things that motivate anyone to do anything.

On that basis we may find ourselves living with monsters from the Id for quite some time. Maybe even until they make the planet that sustains them uninhabitable by the species that created them.