{"id":828,"date":"2025-11-12T18:15:03","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T01:15:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=828"},"modified":"2025-11-12T18:15:03","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T01:15:03","slug":"pantheon-authenticity-perception-and-embodiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/828","title":{"rendered":"Pantheon: Authenticity, Perception, and Embodiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Spoilers Ahead!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pantheon<\/em> is a two-season show on Netflix that centers around the idea of the digital \u201cupload\u201d of human consciousness. The main character, Maddie, encounters the uploaded consciousness of her deceased father, who, for the past few years, has been a digital slave to a large tech company, unaware even of his death and \u201cconverted\u201d without his consent. I\u2019ll mostly be discussing the material put forth in season one, but the whole series overall focuses on the struggle to redefine humanity and the human experience in the face of new technological developments. I found this a really interesting and moral conundrum, especially from a media theorist standpoint. My main guiding question is: What does the series say about perception and materiality when human consciousness is digitized?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will be diving into several theoretical texts, mainly Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/em>, and Bill Brown\u2019s essay, \u201cThing Theory\u201d, from Critical Inquiry<\/em>. In short, Kant says that perception is the structured experience of phenomena, Benjamin argues that materiality\u2014things like place and distance\u2014shape how we perceive, and Brown questions the barriers between human and thing, exploring how these relationships shape both people and objects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kant argues that perception is always mediated by our affordances; we never access the \u201cthing-in-itself\u201d (noumenon<\/em>), only the phenomenon (Kant, 1781). In Pantheon<\/em>, this idea is complicated because UIs (uploaded intelligences) are capable of perception even beyond the regular human state. But what is \u201cphenomenon\u201d for a being without senses or spatial grounding? The experience of a UI is totally different from that of a human. For example, Maddie\u2019s father explains time within the digital system as non-linear and detached from the \u201coutside\u201d world (that is, the non-digital). As technological systems themselves, UIs can speed up or slow down their own consciousness and capabilities\u2014they can live a year in a day or a day in a year. This introduces a post-Kantian crisis: perception without embodiment. However, it\u2019s worth noting that Kant himself limited perception and experience to human faculties, despite his claims of universality. The categories of time, space, and causality have been irrevocably altered by technological progress, but in Pantheon<\/em>, they are all but erased by technology. This destabilization of embodied experience is what sets up the moral and metaphysical crisis of the show. As N. Katherine Hayles might argue, Pantheon<\/em> imagines \u201ca condition in which the boundaries between human and machine blur\u201d (Hayles, 1999), pushing Kant\u2019s categories of experience to their breaking point. This loss of stable perception naturally connects to how Pantheon<\/em> represents identity itself as something that can be copied or reproduced, which brings us to Benjamin\u2019s concerns with authenticity and aura.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/em>, Benjamin writes that reproduction destroys the \u201caura,\u201d or the unique presence tied to time and space (Benjamin, 1936). In Pantheon<\/em>, \u201cuploading\u201d destroys the unique aura of the human being\u2014or for some, the soul. In order to upload, the show details that the brain is scanned and destroyed layer by layer. The physical \u201cbody\u201d ceases to exist. In terms of consciousness, Maddie\u2019s father does still \u201cexist,\u201d but without physical presence or origin; he\u2019s infinitely reproducible. The digital world of Pantheon<\/em> shows what happens when humans become reproductions: consciousness without context, endlessly available to corporations. The aura of human life is stripped away in the same way art loses its aura under mechanical reproduction. But this loss of aura raises a question Brown helps us answer: if humanity becomes immaterial, what still \u201cmatters\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThing Theory,\u201d Brown argues that we only notice materiality when the relationship between people and things breaks down, when matter resists or acts unexpectedly (Brown, 2001). Pantheon<\/em> does this with consciousness itself: when the human becomes data, we realize how much our sense of self depends on material presence. UIs are detached from the regular experiences that so many theorists consider essential to being human. From a standpoint where these digital consciousnesses are not considered \u201chuman,\u201d how do we consider agency? The show\u2019s corporate control of uploaded minds treats consciousness as a resource, highlighting the commodification of even our immaterial selves. This is essentially digital slavery: a workforce that never sleeps, doesn\u2019t need pay, and exists in the name of \u201cprogress\u201d and the \u201cgreater good.\u201d The company justifies it as innovation or immortality, but it\u2019s really about control and profit, not human autonomy. In this way, Pantheon<\/em> exposes a capitalist fantasy\u2014the idea that technology can both transcend and exploit humanity at once. Brown\u2019s insight helps frame the UI as a moment when material boundaries fail, showing that even digital existence depends on physical infrastructures like servers, energy, and networks. Technology and humanity blur here, and the grey area forces us to ask what experiences still \u201ccount\u201d as real. In the end, Pantheon<\/em> suggests that when even consciousness can be commodified, the difference between person and product depends less on biology than on who controls the systems that define perception and meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pantheon<\/em> doesn\u2019t just imagine a digital afterlife; it makes its audience consider the philosophical foundations of what makes experience human. It suggests that even when freed from material form, consciousness remains haunted by materiality, by time, space, and the desire for embodied authenticity. The series ultimately asks whether a being without a body can ever truly perceive the world\u2014or if perception itself is the last thing we lose when we try to become immortal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction<\/em>. 1936. Translated by J. A. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown, Bill. \u201cThing Theory.\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em>, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1\u201322.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics<\/em>. University of Chicago Press, 1999.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>. 1781. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Allie Demetrick<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image sourced from the public domain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spoilers Ahead! Pantheon is a two-season show on Netflix that centers around the idea of the digital \u201cupload\u201d of human consciousness. The main character, Maddie, encounters the uploaded consciousness of her deceased father, who, for the past few years, has been a digital slave to a large tech company, unaware even of his death and … Continue reading Pantheon: Authenticity, Perception, and Embodiment<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103157,"featured_media":829,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[34,8,22],"class_list":["post-828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general-media-theory","tag-materiality","tag-media-theory","tag-posthumanism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103157"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=828"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":830,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/828\/revisions\/830"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}