The Ideology of Climate Justice

In the news because of the #GreenNewDeal and various right-wing attempts to bait its proponents (do they notice that by paying so much attention to an absurd GND while ignoring many more technocratic proposals, they fulfill the exact raison d’etre of this platform: at least you’re talking about it?) But it’s really an evergreen topic.

Any student of ideology should be very concerned about the way climate change is talked about among the progressive set. While most policy matters on the left really are talked about in material terms and how much benefit people will immediately reap (which contrasts positively against both Republican policy proposals and progressive *cultural* discourse), climate change is an arena where discussions tend far more towards the uncertain and symbolic than the concrete. And that should be a concern.

For this discussion, assume I already believe everything quote unquote “all environmental scientists believe” (as if there isn’t plenty of disagreement even when they are to the left of current policy.) Human causes are changing the atmospheric makeup enough that over the next century the temperature will rise by 2 degrees C or more, which will have massive changes in local ecosystems, and devastate coastal cities. One can agree with this, but also think progressive discourse around climate change is terrible.

The problem is that even with this empirical backing, climate change concerns can become like other causes motivated by distant future threats - extremely ideological and symbolic. If you think about movements defined around “okay if you keep doing this thing now you won’t notice anything bad, but generations from now it will lead to collapse so we need to crackdown now”... they are often pretty reactionary. Homosexuality, immigration, atheism or religious tolerance are all things that demagogues have warned “will eventually destroy society, you just can’t see it yet.” Because you can’t see if you’re having any beneficial effects or not, the “cause” easily becomes entirely symbolic and immaterial, dominated by status games among its leaders to see who can be the most pure/extreme/politically savvy.

You see this most with changing environmental issues to “climate justice” and other methods of making it part of the overall social justice alliance toolkit. It becomes one more way to beat down the “greed” of corporations, aligned with a dozen other causes, rather than about “does it have a proposed policy measure that will change material conditions of the world?”

(There’s nothing wrong with opposing corporations of course, but emphasis on the greed of the Other is pathological and generally prevents you from contemplating structural reform, and instead focuses on replacing “bad” actors with “good” ones and hoping it produces change. It will not.)

It helps to split our discussion into moderate measures, and radical measures, meant to address climate change. Moderate measures are those already implemented by many developed nations, and include carbon taxes, credits into research of renewables, etc. Radical measures are ones that would have a large impact on the economy and dramatically reduce greenhouse related outputs immediately.

In terms of radical measures, we should be honest that no government is contemplating them (certainly the GND is not on a sufficient scale). One should not blame democracy - historically authoritarian governments are even *worse* on environmental matters than bourgeoisie republics, if only because they tend to reap the full gains of exploiting the environment. (Do not forget how often environmental preservation was considered a bourgeoisie cause, valuing pretty parks over the defense of the state and feeding the masses.)

We should also be honest that’s probably what is necessary. Scientific estimates of greater than 2C temperature rise usually come with “based almost entirely off of what we have already set in motion.” Very few researchers believe that we can just stop the train now. If the Earth is to be doomed, we have already doomed it. But activists do not promote that message, because it leads to defeatism and nihilism. Which may be true from a political perspective, but that means everything you hear downstream of that is motivated by politics, not truth. The truth is nihilist despair: the world might end or at least displace billions in the next century, and it’s too late to stop it.

That being said, moderate measures are still possible, to reduce what damage we can, and reducing harm remains our moral obligation.

The next lament of the modern tumblr anti-capitalist becomes that capitalist is incompatible with any attempt to reign in pollution, because it is too short sighted and greedy. So it’s important to remember how untrue this is. Most capitalist nations have happily passed laws regulating greenhouse emissions - in fact in most of those nations the conservative party supports at least some version of them. In fact if capitalism was not so adaptable to so many different circumstances, it would not be nearly so damaging an ideology - it lurches from crisis to crisis where theocracy or dictatorship would fail, never fully failing nor fully fixing its problems.

It’s really only America that is the standout, with the dreadful combination of: a right wing party that has gone all in on denialism, and a veto-heavy system that has prevented moderate measures from being passed even when the left-wing party was in control. Which is terrible and has led to dysfunctional policy. But then the lesson has changed to “America has a broken system of checks and balances” and not “capitalist democracies are inherently unable to confront global warming.”

Machine Learning and Ideology

Article: AI BIAS DOESN'T MEAN WHAT JOURNALISTS SAY IT WILL MEAN

The current political conversation over machine learning apps is so damn depressing.

(Also related: https://discoursedrome.tumblr.com/post/167714252325/joseph-heath-how-to-beat-racism )

Depressing, as in a missed opportunity for what could be amazing.

From rationalists, to social justice types, to every strain of thinker about our conflct-happy culture, we talk about “bias” a lot. Maybe it’s tribal bias to “like your ingroup” or maybe it’s structural bias that you need to cure yourself of, whatever. Is it the way our brain is built, our genes, what books we read as kids, our original sin of whiteness?

Zizek (and some other critical theorists) instead say the bias isn’t anything inherent in us. “Ideology is our spontaneous reaction to the world.” You drop a perfectly rational creature in a situation, it looks around, collects some data, then generates conclusions and a narrative based on that data.

A Martian looks around and sees many of the poor people are lazy, and the rich people are energetic. They conclude “wealth must be the result of how hard you work.”

With greater knowledge, we see the errors in this. Poor people may have learned helplessness, while the rich people perform useless work in order to feel meritorious. Or one culture literally conquered and stole stuff from the other, and just coincidentally it matches up to our lazy/energetic divide. Or our definitions of lazy and hard working and rich and poor are hopelessly loose and impossible to scientifically verify.

Rather than the traditional “we would see everything correctly if not for our bias”, with the clean slate neutral observer being the perfect judge, Zizek sees that biased ideology is our starting point, and we need to gather more information to climb out of our first, spontaneous biases.

Ethically speaking: you need to arrive at universal principles yourself (like that all humans are equal), but just going with the observable data is not going to tell you that.

So that’s the debate: is bias something we bring to the table, or a spontaneous result of rational observation of limited and complicated data environments?

Which makes the thing about machine learning controversies fascinating! We write some programs whose job it is to collect the data and give us conclusions… and it turns out they’re racist! They copy insults other users of social media are using, the tell you to stay away from minority neighborhoods when you walk home, rather than pure electronic angels, these bots fall into all our worst, lowest common denominator impulses. How could this fail to be interesting?

Instead we get a very predictable partisan argument. People on the right say it’s because all these stereotypes are objectively true, and now AI is validating them. And people on the left say that the original sin of implicit bias has managed to leak over from the programmers to their children. That if the right people had programmed it, the bots wouldn’t be so full of nascent ideology and *isms.

No one just accepts “if you put a pattern-matching mind into a situation with limited data, it will come to unethical conclusions.”

*****

 dedicating-ruckus

Rather than the traditional “we would see everything correctly if not for our bias”, with the clean slate neutral observer being the perfect judge, Zizek sees that biased ideology is our starting point, and we need to gather more information to climb out of our first, spontaneous biases.

Ethically speaking: you need to arrive at universal principles yourself (like that all humans are equal), but just going with the observable data is not going to tell you that.

Okay, but this is… like, false.

If you put someone with no preconceptions or relevant entanglements into a situation and let them come to conclusions, the conclusions more or less by definition cannot be “biased” in the common political sense. The alien comes and sees that many rich people are hard-working, and many poor people are lazy, and they come to the conclusion that wealth is related to how hard you work. And it’s correct.

(And of course it’s more complicated than that, and a full investigation of “what factors lead to wealth” will come out with a whole laundry list of factors including genetics, various character attributes, general social situation and pure contingent luck. But “hard work” will in fact be prominent in this list of factors. The more detailed analysis filled in and detailed the naive pattern-matching, it didn’t invalidate it.)

“All humans are equal” is true in a particular moral sense, but “all humans have an equal capacity to acquire wealth” is just sky-is-green obviously wrong.

Instead we get a very predictable partisan argument. People on the right say it’s because all these stereotypes are objectively true, and now AI is validating them. And people on the left say that the original sin of implicit bias has managed to leak over from the programmers to their children. That if the right people had programmed it, the bots wouldn’t be so full of nascent ideology and *isms.

No one just accepts “if you put a pattern-matching mind into a situation with limited data, it will come to unethical conclusions.”

In other words, “coming to the best possible conclusions given the data available to you is unethical”.

So if the disinterested pursuit of truth leads you to conclusions that violate certain previously received and unquestionable moral axioms, you must seek more information and overcome your biases until you can get yourself to conclusions that match with what you previously thought. Never mind if the extra information you seek continues to lead you down paths of wrongthink. Continue investigating until the answer is acceptable!

Also, make sure you walk through bad neighborhoods on your commute home, otherwise it would be racist!

*****

If our neutral alien were to land in early 1800′s America and look at black versus white people, they would probably conclude that black people had dramatically less intellectual capacity than white people did. Because they really weren’t as educated by most metrics.

Of course it was because they were denied education (and otherwise punished for being too smart.)

Look at this like a proper Bayesian: your priors are important. You can for instance start with “brains of roughly the same size and structure are probably roughly similar in outputs”, and even though you see a lot of examples of black people being able to read less than white people, you can hold firm to that prior until you’ve untangled the confounding nurture variables.

I would not stick to priors I had reason to believe are wrong. Just my prior of “most-to-all people are capable of complex thought, emotions, and motives” overrides almost every statistical inference I would make if I were a naive frequentist.

There’s nothing wrong with saying the current state of some people are such that they commit more violence or can read less. In fact, denying that is the sort of liberal idealism that refuses to face the ugly degradation of poverty, how being low class DOES make you worse off than others. But this is very different from the essentialism of saying “all people of that race are like that, and I don’t have to look at any individual case or check for other reasons they’ve become like that.”

Cargo Cults: 17776 and Homestuck

Jon Bois' epic about the future of football, 17776 just finished. If you haven't read it, you should, or at least read the first page/chapter.

A number of commentators, both on tumblr and reddit have said it's very similar to Homestuck, the MSPA adventure, and there's definitely an overlap of fandom. Homestuck, remember, is a meta-textual experimental piece of outsider art about kids who find themselves going on fantastical quests in a computer game after the world has been destroyed.

They're not wrong, but they're not right either. And their comparisons are a great example of cargo cults.

The phrase "cargo cult" refers to island cultures that would make first contact with Western civilization, and would see all the material goods they brought, and so try to replicate this process of receiving cargo by building runways or statues of planes or whatever else looked like the Westerners.
So the term refers to worshiping the superficial aspects of something complex, and ignoring the true reasons it works.

The basic explanations for why Homestuck fans like 17776 is "they are chatlogs with different colored text and typing styles to represent different characters" and "JUICE is a lot like Dave" (sarcastic, mean, but so enthusiastic that he can't resist info dumping about things he cares about) and "it's a mix of video and bad, static html" and "it references pop culture."

Except this is a pretty bad explanation. Why? Well for one it's really easy. To make, that is. Like do you know how many Homestuck fan artists have made fanfic with "different colored text" and "someone who sounds like Dave?" It's not a hard thing to try. And yet "capturing the feeling of Homestuck, enough to enthrall fans" is much harder. Why is that? They're mistaking the tactile details for what is actually compelling. Cargo cults.

The first thing that really makes it work is the "rapid recontextualization." Already on chapter one, you have this slow dialogue happening between Nine and Ten over the course of years, slowly revealing stuff but mostly a) entertaining us with their dopishness and b) slowly doling out facts that explain the situation. It's agonizing. And then, on a dime, something unpredictable happens that accelerates the fuck out of the story, giving them instant communication and explaining who the satellites are, complete with dramatic screenshots of satellite related stuff. And after that point everything in the story is in this new context and new speed.

Hussie did that a lot too, with interminable dialogues between John and whoever, point and click hunts by John (or whoever), until a random thing happens and then bam, we know a whole lot more about the (much wider) world in one instant. This is frankly some kind of operant conditioning that addicts a non-negligible part of his audience. It's no surprise it would grab the same people.

Bois in particular does this with the video pieces. It's not just "it uses both static html and video", but the way it uses video. Which is to provide a sudden jump in information, showing the project exploding to a whole new scale. Compare the first video at the bottom of chapter one, with something like Act 2 End: Ascend. They are very similar feelings of suddenly "everything gets real now."

In this way "dialogue, dialogue, snarky/self aware dialogue -- eye opening video of sublime realization (followed by similar dialogue commenting on that video-enlightenment)" operates as a tandem pair, neither entirely working their full effect without the other. This is where Homestuck draws its power, not "someone is snarky like Dave."

Although it's not a coincidence the Dave voice repeats either.

I mean, the most important voice is not the Dave/JUICE voice, but John/Nine. They are, in Tarot terms "the Fool." They are the blank slate protagonist who is only just now learning everything about the world, along with us. Many critics would call this "the audience identification character", but it's not really who we see ourselves as, they are just the lens we can most easily learn about the world from.

Well, it makes sense that the Fool is first introduced to the world by someone smarter than us, but patient and benign. That is the Rose/Ten character. Only after we have the discoverer character, and the teacher character, can we have the third: the meta-aware character. That's Dave, that's JUICE, and that's our actual audience identification. We're genre-savvy, detached from the story, and prone to snarky comments. So both MSPA and 17776 have this same introductory tryptych: Fool, Teacher, Irony-master. It's a good combination for laying out a fictional universe (and explicitly stating to the audience the literary themes of this universe, as Dave/JUICE often does), and that's why people feel such similarity between the two.

Same with the pop culture references. Every work of art references pop culture these days. The key here is that 17776 and Homestuck both blatantly reference pop culture, and aspects that are not at all relevant. You get Con Air and Steely Dan coming up (but not Hillary Clinton or I lik cow or the Wire.) It's decidedly silly stuff, that tells us a lot more about the characters involved, than really makes us feel a connection to them.

Of course, both artworks explore a post-apocalyptic scenario. Homestuck deals with an Earth that has been destroyed, and what the relevant kids do beyond that, and 17776 deals with an apocalypse that ended all struggle and meaning to life, forcing people to discover new meaning. It's about what happened to our world after something major destablized everything important about it. Post-apocalypses are just commentaries on the world as it currently is, but laid bare. And with this tryptych we can get an accessible explanation: the Fool asks what's going on, the Teacher answers in the Watsonian sense, and the Ironist answers in the Doylist sense, explicitly telling us why the author is doing this here.

This works well with the middling desires of most of the audience: they are reading webfic because they want to explore something new, they want world building that is interesting and makes sense diagetically, but they want a little bit of thematic awareness that makes them knowledgable art critics.

Once we have gotten used to this trio (or rather, right before we have gotten used to them, and when we feel we are just getting the groove of the conversation,) both works then suddenly switch gears and add new voices. These are very down-to-earth voices, that assume a high degree of context to understand. (Often when switching scenes, you're coming in mid-scene to the next thing, and the first few lines of dialogue will be the reader trying to catch up to what's going on. It's mildly intellectually challenging, but more, it's constant and addictive.

Now in Homestuck, those new voices are eventually built up and worked into the diagetic plot, whereas in 17776 those voices are instead worked into the overall thematic message (often as explained by JUICE.) This split between emphasis on building plot, vs explaining its themes goes all the way through to the two very different endings (one of which was fulfilling, and the other of which... was really not.)

There are other thematic and mechanical parallels that make 17776 and Homestuck work similarly, and you can play around with them yourself.

**************

However, this obsessing about cargo cults can be a trap, like the old lady asked about what supported the turtle who carried the world on its back. "It's cargo cults all the way down."

The phrase cargo cult creates a dichotomy between that which is superficial and misleading, and that which is deep and the real meaning of the work.

But, breezy thematic analysis (like my own) can be just as cargo-cultish. You list off some words like genre-savvy, paganistic, or ironic detachment and at least some people will just nod along to how cool you sound. There's no guarantee you've found the real meaning, and haven't just found another idol to worship.

This is of course because there is no core, essential meaning to the work.

Holloway’s desire is to ask the alien-gods the meaning of life. This goal is utterly unobtainable, and the film establishes elsewhere that life has no inherent meaning (existence precedes essence) and, even if one could speak to the alien-gods, the message would be something unsatisfactory like 7*7=42 or horrific like Event Horizon’s ‘we don’t need eyes to see’.  

SMG on Prometheus

Especially in art. There is only the superficial.

One should thus invert the usual opposition within which true art is “deep” and commercial kitsch superficial: the problem with kitsch is that it is all too “profound,” manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while genuine art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract its subject from the “deeper” context of historical reality. 

Zizek

So you're peeling back the layers of the onion. On the first layer is "different colored text, and sounds like Dave," and the next layer is "uses video as a climactic way to broaden the scope of the work." And in some ways that next layer can be more useful - in this case I think it explains affinity between these two works better, and offers a more reliable predictor of what else fans will like.

But it's still layers of the onion, and you'll never reach some inner kernel of pure meaning. You can never guarantee that you have found "what audiences want."

To address the original analogy, you could imagine some start-up entrepreneur who laughs at the cargo cults of Pacific Islands, and thinks the real idols you need to worship are the global supply chain, and synergy, and strengthening the free market. Now they might have a practical understanding of how to build their company, or they might just think that if they say enough buzzwords then investor capital will be drawn to them and they will get rich.

Time Travel Activism

After I’ve rambled enough at people about ideology, and anarchy, and communism, and universal love and acceptance, people ask “Okay Humanist, but what do you do about *real* problems? You mention preventing bad actions, but what does that mean outside the ideological system? If you love everyone and don’t cast justice on anyone, how do you stop all the serial murders and systemic poverty and potential global catastrophes, and that shit” Besides the problems that will whither away when fear and status are less strong - how do you prevent the monstrous, chaotic evil of an uncaring universe.

To which I say, watch a time travel movie.

When a protagonist has seen a catastrophe so bad they must go back in time to stop it, they act in certain ways. They are very very specific. They want to find one tiny thread that led to disaster, and stop it.

Maybe this just means telling someone “don’t do that”. Maybe it means hindering them, or even killing them. Maybe it means moving an inoffensive object at one innocuous moment, changing the course of history. It’s a limited change, but very dramatic and definite.

What do they not do? They do not “form a committee” or “raise awareness”. They do not accumulate their own power base. They don’t shun the person responsible or their works to keep their hands clean - if anything they engage with them as directly as possible. Those sorts of actions are very unlimited in scope, while being vague and ill-defined in their influence on a specific chain of events.

Sometimes the time traveller will for arbitrary reasons “not know” some key information, such as who the person they were sent to stop was, etc. This doesn’t cause them to give up or even change tactics. They must acquire that key piece of information, then again, act definitely. Or perhaps act on the tool that person will use, but still in a specific act definite way.

Think back to your own life, and disasters you’ve seen. Personal or national. Imagine you were sent back before one, and could prevent it. What would you do? How surgical would you be? It would probably involve a lot of yelling at a specific person to get them to change course, and that’s it.

If you are like me, it is very unlikely that your answer to that question resembles what ideological movements in practice do. They operate with less information, yes, but they are not even *trying* to be dramatically specific.

In fact, we can learn a lot from the time traveller. We admire their clarity of purpose. But they are also completely unmoored from society. They are well aware that everyone around them thinks that they are crazy but that doesn’t matter. Their judgment is obviously irrelevant to someone who has seen what they have seen.

The time traveller barely even tries to convince anyone. They don’t need anyone’s approval, so much convincing for our actions goes out the window.

And in a sense, the time traveller is acting completely without reason. No, without cause. For in fact the cause for their actions does not exist in this universe. They are a spontaneous ethical being, doing the right and necessary thing for no prior at all.

The time traveller is beyond class and status. They might remake the entire world, or they might just save one life, but they are laser focused on that and nothing else.

My favorite time travel hero is Ebeneezer Scrooge. He sees the Christmas Future and knows that a doom of loneliness is coming to him. And when he wakes up… he is filled with joy! He can fix things! He does not form a committee to see about this friendship thing, he immediately buys a goose and takes it to his employee’s family.

We can do this too. If something very seriously bad might happen, be as specific about it as you can. Act like it already happened and the details that led to it were realized. Then work backwards and prevent that very specific thing.

Free yourself of fear, status, alienated cruelty, and justice. When you do that many of the concerns that plague you will fall behind. Anything else you need to resolve: be a time traveller from the future to today.

"The role of the activist should not be to push history in the right direction but instead to disrupt it altogether. Žižek writes, 'this is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement. An act of 'divine violence' would then mean pulling the emergency cord on the train of Historical Progress.' To accomplish this act of revolutionary violence involves a switch of perspective from the present-looking-forward to the future-looking-backward. Instead of trying to influence the future by acting in the present, Žižek argues that we should start from the assumption that the dread catastrophic event -- whether it be sudden climate catastrophe, a "'grey goo' nano-crisis or widespread adoption of cyborg technologies -- has already happened, and then work backwards to figure out what we should have done. 'We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny -- and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past.' In other words, only by assuming that the feared event has already happened, can we imagine what actions would need to have been taken to prevent its occurrence. These steps would then be actualized by the present day activist. 'Paradoxically,' he concludes, 'the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.'"

-Micah White, Notes on the Future of Activism

What Will the Future Think of Us

One of the most potent forms of the Big Other is “the opinion of future generations.” I was reminded of this by @ilzolende ‘s discussions.

The “future” is an understandable God to worry about for a number of reasons:

• It’s objective. We’re so caught up in a current struggles, we like to think about someone who isn’t self interested in any of our fights, judging from the Veil of Ignorance, who’s gotten information about how it all works out.
• We judge the heck out of the past. We worry about people thinking the same thing about us we think about the Confederacy.
• Whig history, and general idealization of the future as better and a source of progress.
• We all are searching for a Big Other to comfort us that our decisions were moral and just, and posterity sounds a lot less bankrupt at this point than God or those high school cliques.
• We’re afraid that if the future thinks badly of us, we won’t be around to defend ourselves.

I certainly grew up as a good liberal believing the future would judge me well for fighting for gay rights, just like I judged the civil rights activists of the sixties as the good guys. (In fact I was amazed anyone could not be on the obvious winning side.)

And yet… there is no God to guarantee meaning, not even the future. They are not actually a morally superior arbiter of our present day actions, because they are just a bunch of normal humans.

• Maybe white nationalists will win and the future will be racist and fascist.
• Maybe no records of you will really stand out and while the future may have broad opinions about goods guys and bad guys in the twenty-teens, they won’t know anything about you specifically (and your special snowflake philosophy that didn’t fit neatly into the black and white ideologies isn’t remembered at all.)
• Maybe the future will be wholly caught up in completely different moral divides, and our big arguments will look as senseless to them as the Dreyfus affair or the Butter Battles. 
• Maybe history is written by the victors and you might lose a war, the wrong guys might win, and they make up a bunch of shit about you.
• Maybe people in the future will be as divided as we are now, and by and large too busy to think about us.
• Maybe a big rock will destroy the world and no one will exist to judge us.

They’re just… more humans, with no guarantee of moral accuracy that we don’t have.

Which means you have to decide your ethical bedrock now, and stick to it no matter what some other people think of you. Even your descendants. If you believe that all races are equal, you’d fight for it even if your brother disagreed. Well, same for your great granddaughter.

What’s right just has to be right. No one can vouchsafe it for you.

Collapse

In another thread, I offhandedly mentioned the reasons various radical leftists might believe the current state of the world is not stable or getting better. Since I was trying to summarize “why leftists might feel this way” they weren’t really a coherent argument or reasons I found convincing. 

I don’t actually find Zizek’s “Four Horseriders of the Apocalypse” very convincing. Genetic manipulation of offspring is overrated. Global warming is likely to lead to massive disaster (especially for the global poor) but unlikely human extinction.

Inequality is a threatening problem not because of some conservative sense of egalitarianism, but because it’s creating division in society. The superrich increasingly don’t live in the same world as the masses, but have even more power to determine government and culture than ever before. Financialization and globalization have concentrated the rewards more than any time in human history, and yet the beneficiaries convince themselves it’s all because of their individual brilliance and effort, instead of systemic changes and luck. In response, some of the masses push themselves ever harder and more ambitiously to pass the cut off for being “successful”, making them assholes who can not even conceive of class solidarity or life outside the status grind. The rest of the masses become increasingly resentful and can be led around like a dog into voting for whoever channels their anger at these “elites” more grotesquely.

This makes the elites insecure and overprotective in their power (“the worst form of government is insecure autocrat”), the economic egalitarians despondent and distrusting of the system, the conservative voters purely destructive, and the liberal professional climbers into self-loathing assholes.

(The few times some elites have had this much more wealth and power than those around them… have also generally led to collapse and revolution.)

I’m not sure it will like, end the world, but so far it’s presented a serious challenge that technocratic liberalism has failed to deal with.

[Points I meant to add but forgot when writing:

1. As an accelerator of inequality, I worry about mass unemployment through automation. Now the technical and economic aspects of that are actually complicated, as much of rattumb has discussed to death, but no one ever seems to argue “given the chance to unemploy 80% of the US population, just to increase profits for the positional goods race, the elite will hold back.” No, we pretty much believe that Moloch or sheer dumb stupidity would do something so horrific to their neighbors and countrymen. Under that lack of solidarity, rebellion by the left behind seems like it will be sparked some day over some dumb and heartless decision. People don’t treat capitalism as a means to a goal of full employment and material sufficiency for most of the country, but either an end in itself, or a means to them getting personally rich.]

That’s just the abstract though… more immediately it just really doesn’t feel like liberalism is working to maintain harmony anymore.

Like most groups that used to be fairly liberal and productive (the Democratic party, geekdom, academia, etc) seem to hate themselves more than I ever remember before. Be it the fact that we’re still fighting over the Bernie/Hillary primary, or explosions like Gamergate, there’s just a phenomenal eagerness to turn on each other and expend more energy proving you hate the neargroup villain than on anything productive. I was hopeful a Trump administration would unify the left in the way it had shattered under Obama, but uh, no. Now all intra-left fights have just taken on the extra dimension of “and you being wrong/impure is the reason Trump won!” Everyone’s full of fear at being called the next traitor, and turning that into the passion to call others traitors first.

I think we’ve all seen witch hunts based on flimsy evidence that in previous years we would have been amazed at the idea of devoted liberals falling for. There’s no trust in the norms or institutions to regulate these sort of problems appropriately anymore.

It may look like I am exaggerating, but remember the deal with internal contradictions is that they build up tension for a while then explode all at once (a la gamergate.) Liberalism feels like it’s at a point where the entire intellectual edifice could collapse in short order.

If it doesn’t, great. But if it does, I want to be in the space to offer an alternative for the evacuees to believe in, that isn’t alt-right rage-addiction, or one of the many other failure modes of ideological burnout. I want to construct an intellectual edifice for universal compassion instead.

[2. And on my second section, uh, it doesn’t seem that either politicians or politically passionate voters believe in Constitutional governance anymore. The rules of government exist in most actors’ mind now not because they are good in spirit, but just as obstacles to be overcome. The Republicans seem to be willing to break the norms and exploit the letter of the law much faster than Democrats, but both parties move in that direction. Examples of this are too numerous to mention, but I expect to see more things like the NC legislature voting after the election to strip the governor of many powers - wholly undemocratic calvinball. (Not to mention opportunistic times when one party figures they can just ignore the rules, like with Garland.)]

People need to believe checks and limits exist for a good reason in order for the norms of liberalism to have power. Without that, we’re just an unstable system waiting around until someone figures out how to become a dictator.

What is Hell?

This is totally my favorite comic for explaining what utopia looks like to me:

Most humans can (and have) lived with pain, illness, and facing death with some level of acceptance. What causes us real misery tends to be unfairness, and negative opinions from other people. It’s possible I am drastically mis-weighting human priorities here, but these are at least my intuitions, and I can’t get more fundamental than that.

I don’t just mean this appeals to me (though it does). I mean if we picture a rich man who has all the luxuries of high capitalism but suspect most people hate him, and we compare that to someone who has very little, and is even ill, but believes in the love and respect of the people who matter to him… which one do we think is happier?

On the flip-side, when I think of “Hell”, I don’t think of how you can pile the most physical pain onto a person, or other forms of singular anguish (like the obscene agonies listed in Unsong http://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%99-the-broadcast/ ). I think of being misunderstood and judged poorly, on a massive scale.

In fact, instead of weird paradoxes with “your body is burned every minute but also regenerates so you can keep being burned and also your nerves never develop any tolerance to the sensation” in such a Hell your safety and physical homeostasis would be guaranteed, so you can go on experiencing the psychological turmoil without distraction for as long as possible.

There would also be a lot of communication.

I mean, a lot.

How much communication can there be, you may think. After all, talking with people 24 hours a day is only a very finite amount of communication. But a long conversation is really only one datapoint of “what someone thinks of me.” It packs a stronger and more complicated punch than a one-liner, but it’s still only one punch.

As our communities have surpassed our Dunbar number  our brains have failed to adapt to the idea that “what one person thinks of us is no longer representative of what 1/150 of all people we will ever interact with thinks of us”. A random stranger still packs more psychological punch than they really should on our mental equilibrium.

So it’s not “having a conversation all day” but rather “reading what people who aren’t close to you have written about you” all day. You can read (and scan) a lot faster than you can converse, so this is more efficient.

You can see how larger villages, written letters, the printing press, newspapers and letters to the editor, internet forums all over time increased the number of people we heard opinions from. In many ways this made life richer and more interesting, with greater opportunity for human connection and emotional validation.

But the opportunities to be told that you are a failure, a pig, wrong about something, or a supporter of something immoral, also grew. Even though these insults were *usually* irrelevant in terms of anyone’s ability to affect us directly, our brains still interpret them as valid social threats, and so our sources of anxiety increased.

(The fact that a random insult *might* cost you job prospects or lead to physical harassment helps keep the edge on such insults of course. 99% of the time it won’t matter, but you’re free to obsess about the 1% of the time it will.)

Then social media hit.

***

We used to think the future of communication was richer communication. We’d use videophones for every call, and eventually there’d be hologram-phones and who knows what else and people would download entire libraries into their brain. Better invest in high bandwidth infrastructure.

But it turns out the direction of communication is _cheaper_. The real success came in Facebook where a one-line status update can take only seconds of effort but be broadcast to hundreds of people you care about. Twitter did this even better by *enforcing* a maximum level of effort at 140 characters.

We all know that such very small chunks of information can not convey the complexity of our emotions, or all the details of our opinions. But getting out that one witty bit of information is better than nothing, right? And the returns to scale were just so amazing.

“Bit” of information became literal as our way of communicating with someone was just whether to like/upvote/favorite someone’s post. It’s the cheapest method of all, and incredibly addicting to both send and receive.

(Make an account on reddit and next to your name is your goddamn score, of just how many people have ever liked your posts. It’s like these people read textbooks on how to make humans anxious. It can make the most hardened social isolationist ponder how to make that number higher.)

And because all this communication is easy, it can be read out of context. Was that line you said about wanting to do violence to a political figure sarcastic, very serious, or ironicly imitating how others talk? In a re-tweet those distinctions are impossible.

Imagine what it was like to be Justine Sacco http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html who maintains she was making a sarcastic joke about the nature of white privilege.

With omnipresent social media, everyone will be Justine Sacco for 15 minutes 

15 minutes? I’m kidding. People will probably only think about why they are angry that you upvoted that ironic comment about controversy-of-the-day for 15 seconds, at most.

They’ll do it because the communication is cheap. There were a lot of things you said, and taking one out of context was an easy way to embarrass you. They’ll do it because expressing violent disagreement with you takes 140 characters or one click.

But it will be billions of people downvoting you, sending you inflammatory tweets, and offering glib takes on your faux-paus that you have no power to respond to. While the world has moved, perhaps even expressing sympathy for you about the public’s “overreaction”, you’ll still be reliving memories of the time “everyone” (read: one-out-of-ten online viewers) judged and harassed you.

I’m not exaggerating. This is why outbreaks like GamerGate or Sacco are so devastating. It really might only be a minority that is upset at you, but our brains simply are not set up to understand “a million people saying mean things about me is not representative of the population at large or people close to me”. And once everyone splits up into different ideological camps, that means everyone might say something at least some group hates.

Once you think about that, the heaven in the comic sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

***

“Okay, okay,” you think. “I’m just not going to get into social media then. Or if I do, I’m not going to tweet anything controversial. This dynamic sounds really sad for those people who feel a need to post on social media, but the obviously wise position is not to.”

Maybe. I worry that won’t be an option.

Even now, when outrage cycles explode, their participants often demand people in their circle speak up and can’t be silent. See the Toxoplasma of Rage  (the relevant section is Part V, though it’s all pretty good.)

friends if you are reblogging things that are not about ferguson right now please queue them instead. please pay attention to things that are more important. it’s not the time to talk about fandoms or jokes it’s time to talk about injustices.

This is a limited dynamic… but it’s not hard to see a world where social-media silence is just as critiqueable as a misstep (in fact how often do we mock politicians for not addressing controversial issues enough?) Maybe your silence on an “important matter of the day” will become a source of harassment, be it from friends or people who don’t know you and how you express yourself.

Plus, this world is still capitalism. We still need jobs. Now, the vast majority of jobs don’t require a social media presence… but some do and that sector is growing. You gotta get your brand out there, and by being popular online you can direct people to your work. Already most jobs demand you “sell” yourself one way or another (to potential customers, or donors if you work at a non-profit, or just to the professional community you are in so your employer has “buzz”). The more ubiquitous social media is, the higher the expectation will be that you actively participate in it.

I hate the current cycle we put new journalists in. In order to “explode” onto the scene, they basically have to participate online and drive people to their articles. Inflammatory language that goes with the crowd is the best way to do that. And then one day the journalist crosses a line, and everyone demands they be fired.  No one ever questions how many hits your employer got for your “combative” online style before the explosion. It’s the online equivalent of a Wall Street boiler room that demands you make your sales quotas, looks the other way for how you do so, and then is "outraged" when they find you were misleading investors.

So yeah, I see that system infecting almost any job. You probably won’t need a social media presence to get the most basic job… but if you want a good job, if you want to be very "successful" at it (and viewed as successful), you’ll need to be out there generating buzz for yourself. So you can amend my terrible prediction to “this will only happen to people who care about professional or social success.”

Still pretty bad I think.

(Plus, what you thought was private communication might turn out not to be.  )

***

Let’s talk about the Singularity. It’s the technological utopia where we are all hooked up to the computer grid, with no bodily needs. Everyone is immortal, no knowledge is lost, and communication is universal and free.

It’s dismissed as a geeky pipe-dream, by the likes of Peter Thiel and other technology obsessed quasi-libertarians. I think it is extremely realistic and likely, if current trends in our world continue (and we don’t get hit by a meteor as President Trump launches missiles at China in order to distract from global warming).

Communication with everyone? Haven’t we just learned how dangerous that is. You’ll think “that’s a pretty supernova” and it will upload to your twitterfeed without hesitation. A billion people will immediately downvote you for being distracted and thinking about something besides the controversy of the minute or for idealizing superficial appearance. A billion people will harass *them* for not letting the poor girl enjoy a simple pleasure for just a little bit. Both of these will happen almost involuntarily by all the participants, but as natural as breath.

(Oh, you don’t want to hook your thoughts up to a live twitterfeed? Well we respect your privacy, but really, what do you have to hide? We’re very accepting of all people here, just so long as you don’t have any toxic beliefs. Look I don’t know if we can hire someone to the position of Artist in Residence if we aren’t sure you aren’t a cyber-classist. In this depressed economy, there are plenty of other desperate graduates we can hire instead, who make clear where they stand on the principles we find important.)

Now, such utopians think that without the threat of material deprivation, our anxieties about judgment will go away, and we will all stop being assholes to each other. Everyone is immortal in the computer grid anyway, so there’s no more competing over food or healthcare or possible imprisonment, so we can just stop being afraid about what others think about us.

I don’t think that’s how the human brain works. We can investigate the failure modes of this Singularity just by looking at the results of the intermediate steps.

1. The internet and social media already have much less impact on our physical well being than in person interaction. And yet we still twitch extremely hard in reaction to judgments there. Our reactions are not based on practical analysis of the consequences, but how our brain directly interprets social signals. 
2. There will always be material inequalities. Maybe in the cybertopia it’s about how good your processor is, or how much of some fuel you get, or maybe it will be based solely on labor you get from other humans. But even when we as a society *can* provide everyone with the basic necessities of living, we don’t for a variety of convoluted explanations. The Singularity could easily be like America - with most people having a basic material standard of existence, but much deeper insecurity about how it might get disrupted if any catastrophe happened to them (such as a storm over your tweet’s ironic lack of enthusiasm in the war against cyberAsia). 

So I don’t think the Singularity is a fantasy of fools. I think it is Hell (still, of fools). It’s our current capitalist anxieties driven to the most extreme - where we are constantly performing context-free actions hoping to get validation (and reddit points) from others, afraid of what happens if instead are publicly convicted of moral crimes we didn’t intend. And there will always be a publicly viewable number ranking how popular your speech is.

And you can come up with all sorts of legal rights to prevent this. But what does legal privacy mean if millions of people can demand you open up, or else you won’t be as competitive in your professional field as those who do? Where do your minority opinions go when masses are chanting “freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence”?

If you want to see cosmopolitan Hell, just take any trend from the past 10 years and draw a straight line.

***

This is all to say a couple things.

One, is that I am _really, really_ skeptical of material progress in human conditions without adjustment of the social and economic systems we take for granted. America by most any standards is living in a material abundance, and we Americans are very unhappy. It’s more than easy to see how that continues, no matter how good technology gets.

Two, social media and how we use it comes up a lot. I think specific systems of it are pretty bad for us. I don’t think “willpower to not use them” is a good fix for the system exploitation inherent in it.