The World of Ubik, circa 1992
The Luna base, where the Techprise facility is located, is but one among many off-world outposts. We know that Stanford Mick has designs on an aggressive colonization of the known cosmos, which he intends to accomplish on the strength of the interstellar drive that Techprise is believed to be developing. (Techprise may be understood as a/the model for the absurdly named, cartoonishly rapacious, unregulated, above-the-law corporations that thrive in the dystopian neo-liberal future sketched by Dick in his various novels and stories.) The wipe-out ambush of the unsuspecting Runciter inertials, who were supposedly the best in the business, signals to the reader that Mick is now free to expand his empire without fear of meaningful surveillance, challenge, or reprisal. Without saying so, Dick thus confirms that the defining neurosis of the Anthropocene—viz. the insatiable appetite for colonial expansion and extractive appropriation—is now writ large across the limitless canvas of interstellar space.
The founding macrocosmic premise of Ubik is unmistakable: Humankind has accelerated the pace of its impressive progress in the adjacent domains of science and technology, but only at the expense of remaining otherwise immature, impulsive, irrational, and self-destructive. Much as Marx and Engels predicted in The Communist Manifesto, the collective spiritual investments of humankind—e.g., in philosophy, theology, religion, morality, art, law, and politics—have failed to produce corresponding breakthroughs and have in fact contributed to the legitimation of the capitalist mode of production, which, pace Marx & Engels, Dick presents as invincible. Hence the darkly comic dystopian setting of Ubik: Atomic Age technologies are deployed by (and against) individuals whose religious and moral beliefs were forged in the Iron Age.
The stagnation of our long-deferred progress toward spiritual enlightenment and/or species maturation is confirmed by Dick’s reliance for his chapter epigraphs on pithy commercials for Ubik. In the post-secular world he envisions, religion has fully capitulated to the allure of the marketplace. As these perky commercials are meant to indicate, Dick expects humankind, circa 1992, to seek (and find!) redemption not in its devotion to (and fear of) otherworldly deities, nor in the afterlives these deities gatekeep for their favorites, but in its reverence for nifty consumer wonder products: beer, brassieres, plastic wrap, razors, etc. Thus emerges Dick’s preferred understanding of the condition known as nihilism: we late moderns continue to crave an intensity of meaning and recognition that we can neither acknowledge nor abjure. We furthermore remain convinced that we may find what we seek in the secular realm, despite our failure thus far to do so and the severity of the market forces that we know to be rigged against (most of) us. Clever advertisers have figured this out about us, and they have packaged their consumer wares not simply to satisfy our basic subsistence needs, but also to target our unfulfilled longing for recognition and redemption.
Dick thus foresees and simultaneously lampoons the crypto-religious status of late modern capitalism. By dint of its multi-functional ubiquity, Ubik is cheerfully recommended as the one-size-fits-all opiate of the masses. God may not answer our increasingly pitiful prayers, but Ubik does. The catch? The miracle of Ubik is available only to those who reside in the virtual worlds inhabited by half-lifers. Instead of simply banishing the afterlife variously described by the Abrahamic religions, late modern capitalism has refreshed the afterlife with a fashionably modern (and appealingly populist) upgrade: the meaning and purpose we late moderns half-heartedly seek is affordably available to everyone in half-life. As if responding to a dare to sell what cannot be sold, late modern capitalism is now poised to break the fourth wall of consumer demand: death itself becomes a desirable commodity for the non-wealthy. Cannily re-branded as “half-life,” death becomes the popular, rational lifestyle choice for those of limited means, limited options, limited imagination, and limited determination.
It is at the limits of this conjectured disparity—viz. between the technological progress and spiritual stasis of humankind in late modernity—that Dick is once again at his inventive best. The ultimately serious question he explores in Ubik pertains to the possibility that we late moderns, possessed of wondrous technologies and desiccated souls, might be better off dead. This is the case, moreover, not simply in the (negative) sense that our mortal torment would finally come to an end, but also in the (positive) sense that we would flourish in death as we have not managed to do in life. The case study in question is that of Joe Chip, whose virtual adventures in half-life, aided by the timely interventions “from outside” by Glen and Ella Runciter,[i] are far more vital, passionate, directed, and meaningful than his disorganized, shambolic life prior to the explosion on Luna. Finally free of his debts, of his disheveled conapt, of his zero-sum competition with Don Denny, of his fatal attraction to Pat Conley, and, more generally, of his dead-end existence, Joe cuts a half-life figure of courage, ingenuity, perseverance, and pluck. For those of us who, like Joe, cannot afford the emerging technologies that would extend our lives, replace our sluggish organs, and postpone indefinitely the big questions that we remain persistently unprepared to answer, a virtual off-ramp—worthy of the heroes we are not and never have been—may be our best option.
The Virtual Search for Compensatory Meaning
When Joe Chip finally encounters Jory Miller, he confirms that he searches not simply for an explanation of the strangely familiar virtual world in which he resides, but also for its origins and first principles. After vowing (and failing) to kill Jory (Dick: 782-83), Joe surmises with fervent (but unearned) conviction that Jory is
one of two agencies who’re at work; Jory is the one who’s destroying us—has destroyed us, except for me. Behind Jory there is nothing; he is the end. Will I meet the other? Probably not soon enough to matter…
(Dick: 783-84)
As it turns out, of course, he does meet “the other,” and he does so in the very next chapter. As his initial dose of Ubik wears off, and he once again manifests the symptoms of his own regression, Joe encounters (and invites to dinner) a pretty, blonde pig-tailed girl who saves his life and explains his predicament. The girl, who introduces herself as none other than Ella Runciter, presents him with a certificate entitling him to a lifetime supply of Ubik, which, he now knows, will neutralize the effects on him of the otherwise consuming regression. This means, presumably, that he need never die within the virtual reality he inhabits.
Newly persuaded of the likelihood of a neo-Manichean duel between Ella (Eros) and Jory (Thanatos),[ii] Joe reprises the gist of his earlier realization:
You’re the other one…Jory destroying us, you trying to help us. Behind you there’s no one, just as there’s no one behind Jory. I’ve reached the last entities involved.
(Dick: 789)[iii]
Jory may be the more powerful and enterprising of the two primordial “entities,” but Ubik evens the playing field on which they spar. Although either “entity” may temporarily gain the upper hand, neither can vanquish or destroy the other. As a proud member of Team Ella, Joe is now free to admire Jory’s virtual craftsmanship without placing himself at risk of the regression it begets.
Neglecting to comment on the validity of Joe’s final stab at cosmogony, Ella explains that she has come to his aid so that he may “replace” her in half-life when she is “reborn into another womb” (Dick: 788). According to Ella’s plan, Joe will advise Glen from his cold-pac half-life, while she concerns herself with her new life, whatever that might involve or entail. After Ella departs, Joe once again encounters the evil Jory, who, having body-snatched a local pharmacist, regresses—and, so, renders worthless—the pharmacy’s entire stock of Ubik. As Joe once again succumbs to regression, however, he is visited from the future by Myra Laney, who presents him with a full spray can of Ubik (Dick: 794). After spraying him, she assures him that he may summon her from the future whenever he needs more Ubik (Dick: 795).
It is no coincidence that Joe is aided in Chapter Sixteen (and supplied with Ubik) by two women. Central to the hero’s arc he travels as a half-lifer is his improbable appeal to attractive women who, unlike the succubus Pat Conley, are eager to serve and assist him in his time(s) of need. With nothing to fear from Jory, and everything to gain from his guardian angels, Joe may proceed along his hero’s arc to its clichéd conclusion. Dick’s recourse here to the stale adolescent trope of the “pretty” woman who exists only to breathe life into an underperforming male hero confirms the contrived, user-friendly conceit of the virtual reality adventure in which Joe finds himself immersed.
At the conclusion of Ubik, the unnamed narrator tosses one final curve ball: “This was just the beginning.” With no postscript to consult, and no sequel in the offing, Dick’s whiplashed readers are not only obliged to make sense of the sudden appearance of likenesses of Joe Chip on poscred coins, but also to discern in these “manifestations” the heralded “beginning” of something new (and perhaps even more bizarre). Are we to understand that Joe Chip has somehow transcended (and perhaps escaped) his half-life existence?
My take on this new “beginning” is that Glen and Joe are about to embark on a new, timely, and potentially lucrative commercial venture. Rather than replace the (ineffective) inertials who were killed in the Luna explosion, Glen has decided to scale and monetize the experiences of Joe and Ella in half-life. (As the likely mastermind behind the explosion, Glen has engaged in what self-anointed neo-liberal business gurus call “disruptive innovation.”) Glen will manage the company from his world, which may or may not be the real world, while Joe oversees and restocks the fantasy inventory in half-life. (It is possible, moreover, that they will persuade Jory Miller to contribute his talents as an architect of virtual cityscapes.) Together, they will offer the desperate masses of have-nots an affordable death hack—namely, a realistic virtual adventure in which those who voluntarily enter half-life are implanted in the satisfying, Ubik-driven hero’s arc they never managed to sample while living in the real world.
Joe’s virtual rebirth in the aftermath of the Luna debacle thus serves as the blueprint for the half-life adventure that soon will be available—at a price—to every death-fearing, life-squandering chump who can afford the cost of admission. Or, as in the case of Glen and Joe, the death hack they have improvised may be gifted by the über-wealthy to those among the underclass of whom they have grown fond—a scalable expression, as it were, of noblesse oblige.
The hard launch of the newly re-branded Runciter Associates coincides with another, more ominous “beginning”—namely, that of the post-truth period in human history, wherein reality is finally and forever rendered indistinguishable from what we currently call virtual reality. As our technological prowess continues to metastasize, and as our spiritual stagnation persists, the confidence we formerly might have placed in our ability to draw meaningful metaphysical distinctions has waned. Like Joe Chip, who no longer cared that his redemptive hero’s arc was an utter fabrication, we have become permanently detached from what we formerly knew to be (and learned to rue as) the real world.
[i] In the context of his interpretation of Ubik as a statement of Dick’s experiment in “postmodern Gnosticism,” Braver suggests that Runciter plays the role of the Christ-like “redeemer” (Braver 2016: 91-99).
[ii] I am indebted here to Braver 2016: 89-91, who persuasively develops a Gnostic interpretation of the primordial dualism to which Joe Chip (and perhaps Dick) are committed (Braver 2016: 88-91).
[iii] Yet another appeal of a virtual, half-life existence: Unlike the radically de-centered real world of 1992, wherein the fragile human ego bears the bruises of the three tremendous blows it has endured (according to Freud), the virtual world of 1939 affords Joe the traditional privilege of unapologetically placing himself at its center. He thus identifies the two primordial agencies of the virtual cosmos he now inhabits, and he does so with exclusive reference to his own need for it to make sense to him.
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