The Simulation Argument

A filmmaker’s delight: my favorite scene from Atlanta (Season 2, Episode 7)

Nadine: Is she real?
Darrius: Real fake.

Insightful and humorous dialog, dreamlike cinematography, beautiful in every way.

Darius (played by Lakeith Stanfield) and Nadine (Gail Bean) in this scene have opted out of the spectacular illusions assumed by their friends who have been lured as guests to a hypothetical celebrity’s mansion. The anticipated appearance of the celebrity throughout the episode keeps the audience engaged. But why should it?

The celebrity is entirely a construct of the 20th century. It coincides with the pro- liferation of electrical telepresence media, arguably fostering the emergence of person-ality cults at global scale and with near-divine prestige. Viewers today have the free-dom to choose the kings and queens they worship and adore, to fix their gaze on whomever amuses to their delight. The “celebrity” (or the “star”) embodies a lifestyle image from which needs and desires are simulated. Their image offers a portal into a lifestyle that is unattainably sought after to most working class individuals; it renders physical inaccessibility as virtually accessible. As Situationist thinker Guy Debord writes:

Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived; the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived.

For people in the real world who toil as construction workers, janitors, and nurses, et cetera, who “actually” live these “specializations”, the “shallow seeming life” of the celebrity in the simulated world is offered to the people of the real world in exchange for their “fragmented productive” labor. The illusion (or social contract) in its most acute form is: work hard and one day you will become a star (or at the very least get to meet one) with all their status, privileges, and lifestyle benefits. In more protracted forms, the social contract reduces to: work hard in exchange for leisurely consumption of spectacle. The celebrity presents itself as just another fetishized commodity, or personal brand, to say contemporaneously; or an idealization of an individual consumer’s mannerisms and lifestyles through brand association. So long as the celebrity produces spectacle, and therefore brand value, the relationship between the celebrity and its consumers is social capital in exchange for consumer engagement.

Debord describes spectacle as a tool for mediating social relations between people by replacing real life with images of non-real life. Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) takes this further and posits that in a sufficiently advanced society, image becomes more symbolically powerful than the real thing itself. In turn, the non-real simulation becomes more real than the real thing, rendering the real thing virtually meaningless. The simulation becomes “hyperreal.” A place like Disneyland for instance, says Baudrillard, exists to serve this purpose. The Bostrom hypothesis, to which Darius alludes in the scene above, entertains this prior art; and more recently, these musings have even prompted serious scientific inquiry (see: Doran, et al 2008, Beane, et al 2012, Museum of Natural History 2016). Without any distinction between the organically lived and the computationally simulated, the popular kids in class now have the tools to generate and replicate hyperreal images of themselves in their palms at the cost of just a few swipes — perhaps validating some psychosocial ramifications of these musings.

Apart from just a mind-bending thought experiment, there is a more pernicious element to simulation particularly when we examine the case when social capital transforms into political capital. Again invoking Debord:

In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived.

And so by this transformation, the modern politician assumes many of the same attributes as the modern celebrity. In order to accrue and maintain political status, the politician must manufacture symbols of him/herself for the consumption of viewers with voting power, which is analogous to the celebrity who wants to accrue and maintain social status through spectacular consumption. Due to the sheer complexity of civilization today, the modern voter is unable to process all the data points necessary to make a comprehensively informed decision, and so all unknown variables reduce to a simplified image that the politician has created for viewers. The politician can only at best offer a (miniature) simulation of society as a promise to its constituents. In effect, voters must believe a politician in the same way an audience must believe an actor.

In some cases, the simulation is a one-to-one reflection of the real, in other cases it is not. And in extreme cases, highly distorted simulations can be weaponized to propagate beliefs to the point where all decision making systems are grounded in popular falsehoods to the benefit of the celebrity politician. In all cases, just like the celebrity, the politician must stage theatrical performance for the preservation of his/her political status (viz. cult of personality).¹ As Baudrillard notes:

It is through the simulation of a narrow, conventional field of perspective in which the premises and the consequences of an act or an event can be calculated, that a political credibility can be maintained.

Popular cinema and television, rich with conventional symbols, blurs the distinction between the social and the political thus conflating social and political credibility. The greatest distortions occur when performers and politicians are substituted for one another, for social value in pursuit of celebrity.

bush-ellen

Near the turn of the millennium, the Wachowski siblings gave us The Matrix (1999). The film became a cinematic tour de force that introduced a branch of obscure post-modern thought into our popular culture ² by posing to its viewers in a visually compelling manner: what if what we perceive as real is in actuality fake?

The story’s supporting character, Morpheus, alludes to the taoist philosopher Zhuangzi in a conversation with the lead character as he is revealed the truth for the first time:

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you weren’t able to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference from the real world and the dream world?

These ideas go as far back as ancient times. The modernists offered their remedy by appeal to rational thought. But what is different though is the climate of this high-stakes historical moment. False simulations produced by celebrity politicians for spectacular consumption among those whose thinking capacities are sufficiently subdued pose real quantifiable risks to civilization in our times.

What is clear, is that there are some individuals with power who abide by what is authentic and “real.” And others who remain locked in a Disneyland dream state who are (in the words of Darrius) “real fake.”

Beware the real fake.

¹ It should be noted that political theatrics can exist in ostensibly apolitical settings, such as managerial staff in corporate meetings, or salesmen in marketplaces, etc.

² Not to mention being the most heavily cited sci-fi reference in all of hip-hop (see
Genuius and Reddit)

Spectacular Persuasion

mass spectacle

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967)

Ethos. Logos. Pathos. The three elements of persuasion. Acts of persuasion in contemporary society can only scale through technological means. In ancient times this was accomplished through speech and by the pre-industrial era through print, paint, and lithography. Photograph and film brought new life to once static text and images at the turn of the 19th century. And today, moving images suffused with persuasive narratives pervade human minds and bodies by way of digital production and distribution. Except these narratives have become unbalanced in our information saturated societies (or perhaps it has always been that way from the beginning). We live in an age of Pathos where appeal to human morals and rational thought have been discarded for ostentatious display of feeling, sentiment, and appearance. It is an age of Spectacle.

mass spectacle

The powerful employ spectacle for perpetuation of power, which in turn perpetuates spectacle. The cycle is amplified by a celebrity-industrial complex of highly connected members propagating status symbols through distributed information networks, and the masses on the periphery of these networks consume spectacular imagery and partake in its celebration so that they may transcend (or perhaps momentarily forget) the boring and mundane realities of life. The non-living image eclipses the living in favor of this cycle where those with status have greatest control of image production, and those without it live on the margins.

celebrity spectacle

Representation, identity, and freedom encamp on these margins. But spectacle outshines them until the margins achieve spectacle for themselves. Though once spectacular persuasion has been achieved in cultural celebration of pathos (and by extension, pathology), all that remains are neatly packaged delusions for mass consumption and entertainment.

The show must and will go on for as long as we choose to live with our eyes wide shut to the real world.

Goes without saying

There are certain facts of human nature that cannot be twisted by Machiavellian motives no matter how extreme or sensitive the political circumstances may be surrounding them. The facts of the matter are that human lives need air to breath, water to drink, and food to eat in order to survive. Regardless of the well from which you sip, these facts are undeniable, inescapable, and inalienable. There are no legislations, declarations, or manifestos that can undo these facts of human nature. No academic citations are needed for verification. And yet as hard as these facts may be, the political reality of today will have you think that accepting these facts are a free choice to be made.

Political reality is no match for physical reality. As the world stands, our civilizations’ air, water, and food supplies are gravely threatened by global forces — not by terrorists, not by warring nations or economies, and not by those who we may easily find disagreeable. The greatest global threat to humanity is ourselves. Now political reality will have you believe that the threat is external, that if we remove the danger that lurks outside or the enemy that hides within, we will have saved ourselves. Physical reality would say otherwise.

Physical reality would remind us that there are nearly 8 billion human lives that all depend on natural resources; that these resources can only exist in an environment where they can be replenished; and that there is a quantifiable chance that we will wipe ourselves out by not being good stewards to an environment that has been so life-giving as our Earth. Physical reality would also remind us that extinctions occur. There could be no self-inflicting wound that is greater.

To be reminded must mean to remember, and to remember must mean there is a history. But history, for some, has a capricious tendency to be memoryless or even ungrounded in facts. History has its way of cleaving political reality from physical reality. Some histories are written by those who are powerful, other histories are written by those who are powerless. Political reality will prey on whatever histories it may find convenient given the circumstances, but it can never divorce itself from physical reality as deluded as it may become. Physical reality trumps political reality. Regardless if you are a Republican or a Democrat, conservative or liberal, Tea Party or Green Party, alt-right or alt-left, citizen or non-citizen, physical reality remains intact: all of us need air, water, and food.

There was a time when political reality was once grounded in physical reality, when bipartisanship transcended political bickering, when environmentalism was a shared and not a party-affiliated value. History would remind us that a Republican, Richard Nixon, in the 1970s created the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He did so by appealing to the shared values of both Republicans and Democrats. History would remind us that a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, created the United States Department of Energy. He did so by appealing to the shared values of both Republicans and Democrats. We witnessed an expression of this shared value in successive presidencies — in the Bush, Clinton, and Obama administrations.

On January 20, 2017, a new administration, an administration which has articulated its intent to divorce itself from physical reality and buck the trend of its predecessors, will assume office. This new administration has promised on its “first day” to renege on his predecessor’s promise to deliver billions of dollars in mitigation funds to countries facing extreme stresses on their survivability due to more frequent and intense natural disasters. This new administration has promised on its “first day” to cancel his predecessor’s executive orders limiting the construction of energy infrastructure projects that are prone to lethal accidents. This new administration has also promised on its “first day” to lift restrictions on businesses notorious for heavily polluting the country and the planet at large.

All these promises sound like good news to anyone who wants jobs and free-flowing capital without consequence. But for anyone who is mindful of the consequences of our actions, there are real risks and liabilities we are adding to humanity’s survivability balance sheet — risks and liabilities all of us will have to pay on a long enough time horizon. Certain risks and liabilities are worth taking, others are not. The dangers attributed to these risks and liabilities are real, and are grounded in hard facts.

It would appear that the new administration and its followers are unaccustomed to facing consequences such as these, and have chosen their own facts. Perhaps this opinion piece did not meet the editorial standards of Breitbart, and did not reach you. Perhaps you worship conspiracy theories, and you deemed this to be propaganda spouted by the globalist liberal elite. Perhaps making America great for some is a nobler pursuit than making this planet habitable for all. Perhaps my reality is different from your reality.

We have a terrific opportunity to truly unite all Americans, if not the whole world, by reconciling our realities and making environmentalism bipartisan again. The ratification of the Paris Agreement testifies to all of us that we can prevail as one people under a common, unifying goal irrespective of geopolitical orientation and national interest. The new administration has a responsibility to demonstrate by example to the nation and to the whole world how we can “come together as one united people” yet owes its success to irresponsibly peddling and pandering division, fear, paranoia, and hate within its ranks and among its followers. The optimists still watching the spectacle unfold are left wondering how much damage can be undone. Others are wondering how much more damage awaits.

To those followers of the new administration, this is an urgent appeal to you and your leaders: do you not need air to breathe, water to drink, or food to eat just like me? Or shall we civilly (or uncivilly) agree to disagree?

Attack in Kabul amid peaceful protests over energy access for minority group

Demonstrators from Afghanistan's Hazara minority attend a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan July 23, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

Demonstrators from Afghanistan’s Hazara minority attend a protest in Kabul, Afghanistan July 23, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

“Islamic State claims responsibility for Kabul attack, 80 dead”
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-protests-idUSKCN1030GB

Saturday’s demonstrators had been demanding that a 500 kV transmission line from Turkmenistan to Kabul be re-routed through two provinces with large Hazara populations, saying they feared being shut out of the project.

The government said the project guaranteed ample power to the provinces, Bamyan and Wardak, which lie west of Kabul, and that altering the planned route would delay it by years and cost millions of dollars. But the resentment felt by many Hazaras runs deeper than simple questions of energy supply.

Water reservoir levels improving in California

The California Water Resources Control Board says the 28 percent May water conservation rate, compared to May 2013, was “phenomenal.” The board says cumulatively, local water suppliers have saved 1.6 million acre feet in the 12 months of mandatory conservation, or enough water to supply eight million people for a year.

Green politics as a unifying force

There was a time when both Democrats and Republicans supported the environmental movement. The first Earth Day in 1970 was brokered in an attempt to heal political divisions within the United States amid the backdrop of the Civil Rights Era and the Vietnam War. What can the nation do to regain unity around the goal of protecting natural resources?

Oil prices down, equity markets up

It is difficult to separate the signal from the noise when gauging economic barometers, taking guesses now that will most certainly be proven wrong later. And today may have been just another one of those days when false negatives and false positives meld to form a most beautifully inaccurate picture for investment pundits — just another blip on the radar — or we may have witnessed a key structural milestone in a global energy economy centered around oil. The downward trend in oil prices over the last two years has shown to have had a dampening effect on equity prices since the fallout began towards the end of 2014. And so almost any trading day oil prices ended lower, there was a good chance equity markets ended lower as well.

But today was different, both in magnitude and timeliness. Oil prices fell, but equities rose. Crude dropped by nearly 3% [1], but the S&P 500 was just shy of a 1% gain and the Dow rose over half a percent. Small caps did even better with the Russell 2000 Index jumping 2.7% [2]. Now one huge confounding variable in today’s trading were remarks made by Fed Chair Janet Yellen, but taken into account suggest that monetary caution is still at play and so nothing has materially changed (or will change) as far as interest rates and money supply could affect asset prices across the board over the next few months. The irony was that in those very moments that Yellen warned investors that lower prices could continue to hurt the economy, equity markets reacted just the opposite of what’s expected when one inflicts pain onto another. In fact the S&P 500 hit a year-to-date high while crude oil straggled. The only harm done by weak oil prices today seems to have been self-inflicted and well-isolated from broader macroeconomic trends.

A divergence in two commonly correlated benchmarks may be occurring. Monetary policy aside (a not-so-modest thing to say), if today is any signal, it’s that the global economy can sustain itself and decouple itself from the value that oil provides to the economy with the right fiscal controls.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-idUSKCN0WU01Y
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-29/u-s-index-futures-little-changed-as-investors-look-to-yellen