The Suspicions of Post-Modernity
Why we will end up with social credit.
In my thinking about the limits of decency I am often drawn to the controversy over performance-enhancing drugs in sport. Most of us in GenX striving to ride our bikes until the last moment before the streetlights came on, were well-aware of our physical limits. We tested them all of the time under the rules of physics in the real world. So, kids like me really hated the world of Sid & Marty Kroft, which was pure weirdness. Our expectation was that our actual heroes, astronauts, motocrossers and those who became extreme athletes would push the boundaries of the possible. Skate the steepest hills. Jump the Snake Canyon. Tightrope the WTC. The difference between real and fake was real. Today, not so much.
I remain fascinated by the extremities of wealth that we have achieve in peacetime. Sometimes I sit with my mouth open when I hear venture capitalists tell young people to follow their passion according to a very customized financial route. They generate excitement in a different way. Silly me, I actually purchased Humane’s AI Pin. We have learned, all of us, to be afraid of the billionaires whose ventures enable wild fantasies. Except I think a certain cohort of us are embracing the impossible. They’re not afraid, in fact they think we realists are living in a falsely constrained past. So they’re all about liberating the world from what it used to be. I am skeptical. I see them as people who get piercings, tattoos and hair dyes that symbolize mastery of the physical world.
Here is the crux where we meet and decide. It is the matter of Joe Theismann’s leg. It is perhaps one of the most unforgettable moments of sport, in which the boundaries of the possible went beyond the spirit of competition. It was the result of the extreme, barely recognizable as human entered the game. It taught me that when you ask for drugs or machines to take human performance above and beyond, things break. In fact, humans break and our reaction is predictable.
The meme of this Japanese anime is well known to American youth, or at least to my son who is now in his early 30s. It represents to me the embrace of the transhuman, the augmentation of billionaires, the extreme world of Sid & Marty Kroft. It’s someplace Christopher Reeve would never go. It’s antithetical to the character of someone like Bruce Willis’ John McClane who takes it to the human limit and keeps his scars until the end. I would dive deeper into the nature of post-apocalyptic Japanese animated fantasy and its tentacle rape, but that’s for another episode. Suffice it to say that finding yourself cringing in horror for a compound fraction in the game of football puts you on my side of the signpost up ahead. The postmodernists desire the Twilight Zone.
Mercenary Subversion
It is because there will be some strange emergent cell-based gig economy, which we are just discovering in California and Minnesota but whose existence we have always suspected, that is probably going to spoil things for everyone. We literally have millions of Americans without the GenX commonsense restraint of actually getting back home before the lights come on. Such Americans have grown their imaginations into realms of fantasy that billionaires and various sovereign powers have put into the realm of possibility. There actually was a Pedo Island. There actually is federal money for fake childcare. You actually can have magical surgery that fools most of the people most of the time. American servicemen actually do defect to China. Not only can you fake it until you make it, you can make it by becoming a mercenary faker. These people tell us about ‘their truth’ all the time. It’s an open secret.
In today’s news I have been informed that the cost of deanonymization has just plummeted. It turns out that one of the skills of LLMs is that they can figure out all of your aliases by that same Bayesian way they figure out the average person’s next word. Even when you change your mind and your preferences over the course of a year or so. As long as I have been writing, I’m a sitting duck. But I don’t mind. I’ve never really tried to be so very anonymous.
I like the other scenario about the farmer who raised award-winning tall corn. He consistently shared his seeds with neighbor farmers. “I can’t stop the wind from blowing my seed to them or their seed to my fields.” He understood that isolating his crop would stunt the growth of his neighbors’ crops.
Of course poison works the same way. I find it difficult to believe that what postmodern Americans do doesn’t affect the public consciousness. We all seem to let dogs into cafes here in California. Dogs are less toxic than cigarettes, but I still don’t like it. Marijuana smoke still smells to me like sketchy sloth, but it no longer freaks me out. I’m not often surprised. I think we’re all adaptable to diminished expectations. But every once in a while I see the equivalent of Joe Theismann’s leg getting broken, or Japanese anime tentacle rape, and I remember that there are people who live there.
Suspicions
In what I think is the second or third best book about AI, Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky, two robots are engage in a quest for purpose and meaning in a post-apocalyptic Anglophone world. They find the equivalent of the Wizard of Oz who is the last vestige of human justice in the world. He is the Robot Judge, and his judgment against all of entities capable of free will is “Guilty, probably”. This very simple inversion of the presumption of innocence is the core of what I’m talking about today.
Let’s add six and seven together and try our luck.
Billionaires and hostile powers fund anything.
Millions of Americans are completely distrustful of a constrained past.
Gig economies are sustainable enough to tilt public perception.
AI can figure you out.
No one can stop the wind.
It seems like the only thing we cannot do is amend the Constitution. While the law stands, the people waver. So what is likely to happen?
What concerns me in this scenario is not the instrumentality of whatever the people decide and our government clumsily adjudicates. It is the content of the character of the people we are. I’m one of those people who like things sorted. I have a Marie Kondo librarian in my mind. I think I know where my ideas belong. That means I’m pruning the wild feathers and unsightly, ungainly, horror-inducing branches from the dark forest of my psyche. I’m appropriately offended by drunk car crashes and I have thrown away my yellow LifeStrong wristbands when I found out about Lance Armstrong’s cheating.
I don’t walk around life assuming that most people are suffering and alienated and incapable of fulfillment because the world is broken and in need of radical change.
Perhaps I should not assume that people who find it necessary to tattoo their necks are not this way as well. Then again, I can read gang signs. I have my suspicions too. I have suspicions that there are people we accept who say “Well of course he was drunk. Everybody likes to drink and drive.” I have suspicions that there are people who say “Of course Armstrong was taking drugs. Everybody takes drugs for that kind of fame and fortune.” I have suspicions that a significant number of Americans, our equals in this society in their freedoms and political rights, have zero faith in their fellows. That they are willing to be mercenary.
Surveillant Society
Back in the days of the Well, we used to play with our pseudonyms and taglines all of the time. There were two that I used to use that I recall. One was that America was a ‘semiotic swamp’ meaning that we had a set of symbols for absolutely everything, most of which pointed to nothing at all in the real world. The other was that we lived in a ‘nation of stooges’, meaning that given the opportunity we would all fink on each other for a modest fee.
I know the tradeoff. We could go off grid, but I think the grid will be pervasive - that is if you want public accommodations of any sort. We could emigrate to Japan. There are pristine parts and ancient culture which are compatible with Western thought. Plus great food and aesthetics, if a bit stuffy socially. Most likely however, I think that we will need to find comfort and sustenance in an increasing diversity of states. I don’t know if the federal government will see an increase in interest from good governance advocates and practitioners. It’s very foggy from my POV.
Either way, the surveillant society is in our head and in our suspicions. Once upon a time every crazy idea didn’t get funding. Now we hardly can guess. I don’t know how it is that so many films and TV shows get air. So few of them are of any quality whatsoever.
One More Thing
I used to spend time at Quora because I wanted to know what unlettered yet curious people wanted explained to them like they were five. I haven’t been there since Christmas. What I was likely to say there was much more snarky and direct that what I release from the zigzags of my mind here. One of the rare ideas I almost never admit to supporting is the ugly realpolitik of Ras al-Ghul. I’m not even sure I spell it consistently. But here is my pessimism spelled out.
