Omnipedia #1: Big picture, in small bits
Audio: Omicron futures, blue-collar furies, Reality+. Essays: Richard Rorty & Postmillenials
Sometimes, the single big-picture frame isn’t quite apparent, on a weekly basis… but my surfing and reading continues. So I’m going to do a kind of “Linktopia with added commentary” this week, until the bridge heaves into view again.
I’ll use another old coinage of mine, and call this Omnipedia. Just so we can be regular futurists-with-Scotland-attached, at least once a week. OK? OK.
🦠 LRB podcast: The Omicron Wave. A discussion between the authors, based on their London Review of Books’ pieces John Lanchester: As the Lock Rattles and Rupert Beale: On Omicron. Gloomy takes from Beale the epidemiologist, as he reveals the assumption of his profession that many (and worse) variants of Covid were always expected. Lanchester, more hopefully, wonders if our societal response could be similar to post WWII - a deep collective conviction that existing institutions and practices had to radically change, in the face of death and disaster.
What are the equivalent institutions which that feeling might produce, similar in scale to the welfare state/NHS, to match our new few crazy decades? And what’s the story that might deliver them? On this, I agree with my colleagues at Common Weal. Perhaps many familiar suggestions that usually wither under the charge of “left-utopian” - UBI/UBS, shorter working week, Monbiot’s private sufficiency/public luxury - might flourish beneath the label “resilient”. Exactly who (and exactly what) will strengthen and support us for this great transition/rough-ride? Aren’t these policies clear answers?
🧎♂️🧎🏾The “us” in that last sentence always needs to be specified. I am very much enjoying the first edition of Prospect with Alan Rusbridger editing - particularly because it has articles like this one on Gen Z/post-millennials, which help with the specifying.
The authors’ book has used some very modern research techniques. For example, establishing a corpus of 70m words that makes up a lexicon of Generation Z (whose oldest member, at time of writing, is 25), and mining them with AI/machine learning. “Stressful” appears in this corpus more often than in standard language use—as does “stuck” and “stagnant”.
In the UK and US, Gen Z majorities of up to 75% believe their political systems need to be reformed - with 15% thinking “the system is completely broken and needed to be replaced”. I liked this quote from David Brooks (which the researchers’ say accord with their findings):
[Brooks] spoke of the students’ “diminished expectations” and distrust of large organisations. “It’s not that the students are hopeless,” he wrote. “They are dedicating their lives to social change. It’s just that they have trouble naming institutions that work.” Instead, the students he talked with were looking to “local, decentralised, and on the ground” agents of change—people, said one student, “that look like us.”
👾👾 BBC Radio 4, Start the Week, ‘Living in The Matrix’. I’ve had the David Chalmers’ book Reality + : Virtual Worlds And The Problems of Philosophy, the basis of this show, as a proof copy for the last few months. TBH, I’ve hardly known what to do with it.
Chalmers’ is the formulator of the “hard problem” of consciousness - which is essentially that we can’t assume that our self-awareness is merely an output of our physical brains/bodies. (In one of my recent Substacks, I cite the neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms who wants to demonstrate that, in fact, it merely is - ie, consciousness evolved to ensure our survival - and feels he has thus answered Chalmers’ “hard” question).
In this new book, Chalmers’ vision of a powerful, autonomous human consciousness implicitly drives a whole new idea of “Reality+“. Which is that our imaginations, using digitality and computation, can design and build virtual worlds (thus the Matrix reference).
What I haven’t been able to take seriously about this book is Chalmers’ use of the simulation hypothesis. This is Nick Bostrom’s thought experiment, suggesting we can’t entirely rule out this giddy possibility: that everything we currently experience, even who we are, might just be an event in someone else’s (or some future society’s) massively powerful computer simulation.
My grumpy response has been: Well, at this moment of all moments, who exactly does this concept help? We are currently beset by a biosphere crisis; one that needs to be measured accurately, so that we can act remedially and concretely. And David, you’re asking us to entertain the possibility that all our endeavours are merely a program in a simulation? Thus has the book languished in the lowest reaches of my highest stacks.
Thankfully, the Start The Week show allowed Chalmers to explore some of the less phantasmal aspects of simulation. I would agree with the philosopher on this point: We will have to honour the intrinsic coherence (or the ontology) of each immersive reality we enter, in what we may have to call a “metaverse” of digital experiences (see my opening column on Substack)
This is what Chalmers means by “Reality +”. And I do think there’s a real, gritty politics in this. Chalmers maybe inadvertently revealed its outline on the radio show, when he blithely imagined we would soon be choosing between “a Google Reality, a Facebook Reality, an Apple Reality...”
Faced with this, let me suggest that different constituencies and organisations (ones perhaps not driven by shareholder value) may need to posit other, contending “realities”. How might that happen? They may need to, as an earlier political tradition put it, “seize the means of simulation”. It’s not hard to envision how this tech could already be used in a much more programmatic, strategic and utopian way than our current entertainment industries can manage.
But if such sim-politics needs vanguards and avant-gardes, skilled in simulation and immersion, I’m disappointed by the ones that currently exist. A post I put up on The Alternative UK this week, featuring the digital rituals of TRU LUV, was an especially underwhelming example of an alternative digital experience.
Fred Turner’s 2015 essay on the Politics of VR still needs to be returned to, dwelt on, and extended into the present. And as far as I could hear, Turner’s proposal for a “democratic surround” - simulations which see users as participants in and shapers of these immersions, not just susceptible minds - did not appear around the STW broadcast table.
👷🏾♀️👷🏼Review of Richard Rorty’s Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism by Jonathan Ree. Another from the startlingly good Prospect edition this month. Not only was Rorty one of my favourite philosophical reads as a student and young creative/music-maker, but Ree reminds us of his startling prophecy from 1998’s Achieving Our Country. It’s worth the full citation:
[Rorty] criticised academic radicals who preened their theoretical plumage at international conferences about the formation of “identity,” while forgetting that they were living the life of a highly privileged minority—the 25 per cent of Americans for whom globalisation was no more than “agreeable cultural cosmopolitanism.”
They ought, he said, to pay less heed to slights against identity, and more to the not-so-hidden injuries of class: “Just as linguists joke that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,” as he put it in a characteristic aside, “one might joke that an identity group is an interest group that boasts an academic programme.”
American radicals liked to think of themselves as egalitarian friends of the oppressed, but they were managing to ignore those of their fellow citizens whose jobs, livelihoods and dignity were being outsourced to the third world.
He warned them that the “proletarianisation” and “immiseration” of masses of Americans were “likely to culminate in a bottom-up populist revolt,” leading to the emergence of some “strongman… willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.” It would be the fire next time.
Eighteen years later, the prophecy was spectacularly confirmed with the election of Donald Trump. Rorty’s words went pinging round the internet…
⛽️💦 Following on from Rorty’s warning, a brief final mention for the Open Source Radio podcast with Dundee-born global macroeconomist Mark Blyth, now based in Brown University. He describes the geographical arc of Trump’s support as fossil-fuel dependent zones. They’re listening to promises of a Green New Deal, and hearing the same bullshit from the 80’s and 90’s, when manufacturing jobs were spirited off by globalised trade.
Towards the end of the recording, Blyth finds an improbable solution to blue-collar Trumpian discontent—in Aberdeen, Scotland. He’s particularly gripped by the North-East’s overall strategy to shift from fossil-fuels to hydrogen production, using essentially the same suite of infrastructures, skills and technologies that drive oil and gas. “Imagine Biden delivered that reality to Trump’s miners and drillers!”
(Delightfully in this show, Blyth hears Frederic Jameson’s famous axiom - “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world, than it is to imagine the end of capitalism” - apparently for the first time.)
I dug into two articles from Blyth posted up on the Open Source site, and thoroughly concur with Mark’s conclusion from this one:
if you hear a politician talking about “getting back to normal”, remember that while this is comforting, they are peddling a dangerous idea we are hardwired to accept. And if we keep accepting it as a plausible goal in the area of climate crisis, we will end up further away than ever from where we really need to be.
As well as accepting the facts, it’s time to give up on getting back to normal and face the fact that there is no normal to return to. As the IPCC report makes clear, there are now only unknown and unfamiliar alternative futures that we can choose from. Embracing that uncertainty, rather than denying it, is the first step to choosing the right one.
“Unknown and unfamiliar alternative futures”. Something that we should fire up the engines of Reality+ to prepare ourselves for?
Any links you’d like me to feature and further explore in coming Substacks? Please contact me here. And all comments most welcome.