Monthly Archives: May 2017

We pay to play the human way

Posted by Jason on

On May 22, 2017, a suicide bomber attacked the foyer of the Manchester Arena in England at the end of a concert. 23 people were killed and 116 were injured. These deaths are “appalling” and “sickening” and “barbaric” and “horrific.” Meanwhile, on that same day, worldwide, approximately 3,425 people died from road accidents, 22,466 people died from cancer, 3,014 people died from AIDS, 8,640 people died from starvation, and 2,192 people died from suicide. These deaths are not appalling or barbaric or sickening or horrifying. They’re fine.

Tabulating statistics is a good way to get yourself labelled a robot or an asshole or a robot asshole, but seriously: why are deaths from terrorism more important than other deaths? Are people who die from “ordinary” causes any less dead? Are their deaths any more justified? Do their friends and family suffer any less? Are those other things even any less scary? Is it really more terrifying to think that you might be killed by someone who hates you just because of who you are than to think that you might be killed for no reason at all?

Obviously, everyone’s going to have their own emotional reactions, and there’s very little point in judging people for how they express themselves, but that’s still the same question: why do we care more about terrorism deaths? Why is our instinctive emotional reaction here to grieve publicly and demand that Something Must Be Done, and why is this not our reaction to the rest of this blood-strewn hellscape we’ve been cursed to inhabit? It’s not because terrorism is some sort of “extra” evil that doesn’t “normally” exist in the world. As long as people have conflicting desires and are killable, murder happens. That’s the cost of being human in the first place. We conceive of terrorism as special because we view it not as random death, but as an attack on “us,” and for that reason, we get scared. This is entirely unjustified. The sorrow of this event belongs to the people who were personally affected by it and to no one else. We are not being “compassionate” by proclaiming our own grief. We’re doing the opposite. We’re fetishizing our immediate subjective reactions, imposing a narrative of generic drama, and eliding the real human reality of the situation. We are devaluing real kindness.

Worse, by doing this, we are not opposing the attack, but conspiring in it. We are fulfilling our role in ISIS’s plan. The point of dramatic attacks like this is not to kill people. It’s to make us feel personally threatened, and to make Muslims feel like our personal enemies. It’s to make this made-up “war of civilizations” fantasy feel like a real thing, and to make us assign outsized importance to it. By itself, ISIS is only capable of killing tiny numbers of people, one sad little bomb at a time. It is only with our active support that they are able to terrorize millions.

But, guilty though we may be, we’re no match for the experts. Every time a politician opens their filthy mouth and pollutes the air around these tragedies, the world becomes a more disgusting place. It is now de rigueur for politicians to compete amongst themselves over who has the biggest and most raging hard-on for skull-fucking terrorist corpses. More to the point, the politically mandatory response to these attacks is to do the attackers’ job for them. The fact that ISIS “claimed responsibility” for the attack doesn’t change anything about the event itself. What happened and who died are all the same either way. (Also ISIS “claims responsibility” every time a dog shits on a Western sidewalk.) Rather, the claiming of responsibility is itself a political act. It is the act of declaring war, of telling you which deaths to focus on and how to feel about them, of forcing one particular understanding of the world onto you. And when Western newspapers print up their headlines making the same claim, and politicians declare Terror Threat Level Burgundy Omega Five, they are taking the same action. They are telling you to be afraid. What we should expect from politicians here is not sympathy or respect or what the fuck ever. It is professional decorum, which in cases like this means keeping their fucking mouths shut. Even if this stuff weren’t directly their fault, even if they weren’t themselves mass murderers, they still have no right to care. They’re fine, and they’re going to be fine. We’re the ones who have to live with their decisions.

Which is of course the point. By appropriating tragedies like this, politicians redraw the battle lines. They point out “those people” as our enemies in order to portray themselves as our allies. They’re lying, and we know this because we can run the numbers. If they were really looking out for us, if they really cared about our lives, they would not be spending billions of dollars on the military and intelligence agencies and a burgeoning police state for the sake of slightly ameliorating a statistically insignificant threat. They would be spending it on fixing the things that are actually killing people, right now, in numbers far greater than any bomb-toting jackass could ever dream of. In order to make these things sound scary, people always like to say that every attack is the deadliest of whatever type since whenever – in this case it’s the deadliest bombing in England since 2005. This sounds dramatic, but what this statistic actually demonstrates is the opposite. It emphasizes the fact that these things almost never happen, that preventing terrorism is among the lowest possible moral priorities of modern society. Numbers don’t signify a lack of compassion here. They signify the truth. It was Dwight Eisenhower who said that every bomb dropped and missile fired directly represents food stolen from the hungry and medicine stolen from the sick, and he was right.

Unfortunately, this is still our fault. Politicians aren’t demons, preparing secret rituals to summon beasts and rain fire on the world. They’re lizards. They find the warmest rock in the near vicinity and they plop themselves down on it. They’ve chosen the terror rock because we’ve kept it warm for them. They are able to blackmail us only to the extent that we convince ourselves we can be saved. The mechanism by which we do this is sympathy. We imagine that there is such a thing as “people like us,” that we’re the “good guys,” and that we “deserve” to be safe. We do not share in people’s suffering for their sake; we appropriate it for our own. People who complain about the “us vs. them” effect usually focus on the “them” part, but it’s the “us” that’s really dangerous. The function of public grieving is to create an “us.” An eight-year old Arab girl killed by a U.S. military action is not “us.” It’s a real shame she had to die, but we’re not actually going to do anything about it. An eight-year-old British girl killed by a terrorist attack is “us.” If we have to keep killing eight-year-old Arab girls in order to prevent that from happening, well, that’s just the cost of doing business.

It is of course impossible to bring this up in the American political context without addressing the attack on the World Trade Center. Even a catastrophe on that scale belongs to the people who were directly affected by it and not to the rest of us. When we say that “everything changed,” we are saying that some deaths count and some deaths don’t – that some victims are real people and some are not.1 This dynamic is easy to understand when actual ghouls like Giuliani use it to jack themselves off, but the rest of us aren’t really any better. We do not have the right to grieve for those people. We have the obligation to do the motherfucking arithmetic.

AIDS is the perfect example. People tried to compartmentalize it away, imagining that it only happened to junkies and degenerates, but eventually they realized it could happen to anybody, and only then, only when rich white people started to feel personally threatened (or, if you prefer, when the activism around the issue was successful enough to garner general sympathy for the existing victims, but that’s the same problem), did they start taking it seriously. This is what happens when you make sympathy a prerequisite for action. People die preventable deaths. What should have been done in the first place, instead of trying to sympathize, was to run the numbers. We should have looked at how many people were dying and spent that much money on the problem. That is the only justifiable political response. Note, for example, that every time a terrorist attack happens, the blood banks always have to put out a statement saying that they’re full up and everybody can calm down. People rush into frenzied action when something sympathetic happens, and they sit on their hands the rest of the time. Resource misallocation kills.

This is also why cancelling concerts in the wake of the attack was objectively the wrong thing to do. If Ariana Grande or whoever else couldn’t personally handle it, then sure, they’re only human, but it’s still wrong. The attack didn’t change anything. People could have died driving to the venue, or there could have been a fire,2 or any number of other things more likely than a terrorist attack could have happened. Cancelling events only serves to reinforce the narrative that this is more important than everything else that’s happening, that these deaths matter more than others. It is not just “okay” to enjoy your life in the face of tragedy, it is the right thing to do. It’s how ISIS loses, and it’s also how our own ruling class loses. If you’re going to get sad and broken down every time something bad happens, you are either sad and broken down 100% of the time, or you are a liar. You risk your life every time you go out your door, and you also risk your life every time you stay home. The cliche that “the show must go on” is deeper than it sounds.

The one sort of tolerable thing about death is that it’s just death. It removes a single unique human from existence and it doesn’t do anything else. How we feel about it, what significance we choose to impart to it, and which actions we choose to take in response to it all remain in the realm of the living. The dead have no claim on us and no power to compel us; transitively, we have no further ability to hurt them. Everything remains, as it always is, up to us.

Meaning this is on you. None of us chose to play this game, but the chips are on the table. So, assuming you’re not going to fold, you have to accept the hand you’ve been dealt. If you try to pretend like there’s any other solution here, you are going to get hustled.

 

  1. In the spirit of intellectual honesty and/or killing one’s idols, there’s a relatively godawful Sleater-Kinney song that is specifically about not being personally affected by 9/11, but being scared of it anyway just because you’re a cute white person with a cute white baby. Not that a song is a political platform or anything, but it’s an expression of exactly the reaction that ought to be avoided. ↩
  2. This in fact happened recently. The Oakland Ghost Ship fire killed 36 people. Fire safety codes are more important than counterterrorism. ↩

Bubble babble

Posted by Jason on

I’m entirely certain you’re well-acquainted with the idea that “media bubbles” are a big problem right now, effecting disinformation and perverting ideology and generally destroying society in an orgy of postmodern technological mediation. Certainly, there is cause for concern; unlike in the past, when everyone had complete correct information that they used to make fully rational decisions, nowadays humans have somehow become closed-minded and parochial. The figure of the barely-informed loudmouth shouting his kneejerk opinions into the public square represents a truly new development in history. And now that bad things are happening in politics, which has never been the case before, it’s clear that something must have gone horribly wrong.

No, okay, so I’m super annoyed about all the hyperventilation, there’s nothing more obnoxious than small-minded arguments against small-mindedness, but there’s also a real issue here. The internet certainly is generating a world-historical amount of garbage data, and political polarization really has increased to an extreme degree. The fundamental dynamic at issue here is what pretentious people like to call “epistemic closure.” When one’s sources of information or methods for evaluating it are limited in some fundamental way, certain areas of knowledge become inaccessible – or, worse, only accessible in the wrong way, such that the formation of inaccurate ideas comes to be considered true knowledge. Fox News will never give a sympathetic hearing to an idea like universal single-payer health care, so if that’s where all your information comes from, you can never develop an informed opinion on this topic. It’s important to realize that this is an absolute constraint; it’s not that it becomes harder to get to the truth, it’s that it becomes impossible. This is the double-edge of the Enlightenment ideal: since there’s no such thing as divine wisdom or whatever, you cannot form correct ideas without accurate and comprehensive information, regardless of how smart or conscientious or committed you are.

Now, one of the few positive results of the 2016 election is that no one is any longer laboring under the delusion that there’s any kind of “unbiased” source that can be relied on for complete information. “Traditional” news sources simply represent one particular set of biases. There’s plenty of issues on which they’re incapable of informing you. Most obviously, an enforced centrist perspective will fail to understand a situation where the “center” is falling apart and all new growth is happening on the “extremes” (that is, it will understand the situation incorrectly, as a “breakdown of communication” or a “legitimacy crisis” or whatever). So the popular response to this is the idea of a “balanced media diet.” The worry is that the internet allows and/or forces people to self-sort into ever more polarized communities, so you have to make the effort to seek out sources that oppose your existing beliefs. The villains then become “algorithms” that deliver pre-polarized information, or “cult-like” communities that suppress dissent.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The most important source of epistemic closure is our finitude as physical beings. Simply put, there are only so many hours each day you can spend reading shit, so it’s more than a little odd to argue that people should be spending more of said hours reading things they believe to be more wrong. If you could really read everything, and also spend the requisite time to analyze and distill it all, then sure, that would solve the problem. In reality, though, you have to choose what you’re going to care about, and any choice you make is going to define a particular horizon. If you’re a feminist, for example, you could spend half of your time reading feminist sources and the other half reading anti-feminist sources, and this would give you a “balanced” perspective, in the sense that you’d understand what’s going on on both sides. But this understanding will necessarily be shallower than the one you’d get by focusing your time on one side; you’ll miss deeper arguments and distinctions and internal diversity. For one thing, you might come to believe that there are only “two sides,” which is not the case. Anyone who knows a second thing about feminism knows that its herstory is coated with blood spilled by many thousands of vicious internal disagreements. One way to get over feminist dogmatism is to read more anti-feminism, but an equally effective option is to read more feminism. There isn’t one choice that “works” and one choice that doesn’t. There are different choices that have different effects. Some bubbles are bigger than others, but you can’t not be in a bubble.

This is why blaming the internet or “algorithms” or whatever misses the mark. Like, I don’t enjoy defending tech assholes, but they really just aren’t relevant to this situation. There is a sort of consumer rights issue here; people should be able to find out how their feeds and things are being customized and change them if they want to. But arguing that search results should be more “responsible” is arguing the opposite: it’s arguing for non-transparent corporations to have more control over what people read. I mean, it’s pretty obvious that most people talking about this are only thinking things through from their side. They see lots of “bad” articles floating around, and they feel like “someone should do something,” so they imagine that Google can somehow code social responsibility for them. Practically speaking, though, you can’t make that kind of a distinction in general.1 “Misinformation” is a value judgment made by the end user. If you write an algorithm that adds more articles about global warming to the feeds of denialists, that same algorithm will necessarily also add more denialist articles to the feeds of people who believe in global warming. You can’t have it both ways. Rather, trying to have it both ways is exactly how things get fucked up. Someone at the New York Times gets it into their head that they have a “liberal bias” that needs to be corrected, so they hire an Islamophobic global warming denialist to write opinion columns. Problem solved.

People want to read things that accord with their beliefs, and – this is the important part – they have good reasons for doing so. The reason feminists, for example, disprefer reading misogynist diatribes isn’t because they’re offended or whatever, it’s because they believe feminism to be true, and they’re obviously more interested in reading things that are probably true than things that are probably false.

You don’t just automatically start understanding things once you’ve read broadly enough. You have to process the information, and how you do that – and why you’re doing it – is going to affect what conclusions you end up with. Like, there is a problem with certain types of feminists spending all of their time yelling at Bad Things and not actually developing their ideas. But if you’re one of these people, and you decide to “broaden your media diet,” all that’s going to happen is that you’re going to find more things to yell at. It’s going to strengthen your existing biases, and that’s going to happen regardless of what it is that you’re reading, and the reason for this is because it’s what you want. This isn’t even a bad thing, because the only way this is not the case is if you lack the ability to critically analyze information, which is, um, a somewhat worse situation to be in. If your goal is just to avoid being wrong, then you might as well not read anything. But if your reason for reading things and drawing conclusions is to do something with the information, then you can’t just wait around until you’re “sure,” because that’s never. In order to actually get somewhere, you have to take a stand somewhere and start moving, which will necessitate rejecting opposing ideas. Breathing underwater requires a bubble.

I’m not just applying this to my own side, either. The fact that people believe all kinds of weird conspiracy theories about the Clintons makes perfect sense, because the Clintons really are classic amoral political schemers, so if you’re opposed to them, it’s more accurate than not to assume that they’re up to some shady shit. Besides, liberals believe whatever nonsense people come up with about Trump, too. It’s the same thing. This is the normal way human communication works.

It does remain the case that the normal way human communication works is badly, and that real lies have real consequences. If you believe that Planned Parenthood is literally dismembering infants and selling their body parts to, uh, somebody (I’m not deep enough into this to know whence the nationwide demand for baby torsos supposedly originates), your advocacy on the subject is going to be somewhat more zealous. But learning the actual fact that only X% of Planned Parenthood’s expenditures go towards abortion-related services doesn’t change the moral calculus of the situation. If abortion is evil, then a little bit of it is still evil. It’s certainly worthwhile to correct lies, but you can’t fact-check your way around morality. If abortion is actually moral, then Planned Parenthood’s particular operating details don’t matter. An organization that spent 100% of its funds on abortion and sold the remains for ice cream money would be a moral organization. Focusing on the nuts and bolts here means dodging the real issue, and this is generally the case in political discussions. Even if Clinton really did use her secret email server to help the Illuminati plan Benghazi, the actual question at hand remains which policies we prefer to advance as a society. In general, misinformation does not add a unique problem to our existing difficulties in figuring out how to talk to each other. It makes things worse, but it’s not itself a crisis.

What is a crisis is when these sorts of discussions become impossible, when an enforced “healthy diet” drains the flavor from the world. When you’re stuck reading nothing but “respectable” media sources, that’s when you have a real problem, and extremism is the solution to that problem. It’s what makes new things possible. Which means that, yes, even the recent explosive growth of rightist extremism has to be understood as a positive development. InfoWars may be maximally false, but if you don’t have InfoWars, you also don’t have the truth. The fact that people have these beliefs is a bad thing, of course, but given that they do, it’s better for them to be out in the open. I mean, their agenda hasn’t actually changed, right? Reagan talked pretty on the TV, but his whole cut-services-and-fellate-corporations deal was exactly the same thing as what the current government’s up to right now. People lately have been praising Bush Jr. for talking nice about Islam, but he was doing this at the same time that his administration was turning Muslims into America’s new Great Civilizational Enemy; Trump is just picking up where he left off. Those situations were worse than the one we’re in now – rather, those situations are why we’re now in our current situation – because there was more obfuscatory rhetoric that had to be disentangled before you could get at what was really going on. This is now less of a problem; we’re getting closer to the point where people actually know what the stakes are.

It’s comforting to imagine that there’s a “middle ground” where we can all get along peaceably, but there’s not. Extremism doesn’t create disagreements, it reveals the disagreements that were already there, because people have real disagreements. Pretending this is not the case prevents anything worthwhile from ever happening. We don’t want a society where there’s “reasonable debate” about sexism, where half the time the Hyde Amendment is in place and half the time it isn’t. We want a society where sexism doesn’t exist. We want everyone trapped inside the feminism bubble, permanently.

This is the truth that must be acknowledged. All the things that people are so concerned about these days – political polarization, ideological extremism, the speed and diversity of information, the dethronement of traditionally respected sources of various kinds of authority – are the things that are, in spite of everything, going well. There’s no way to “fix” this, because it’s not broken. What was broken was the “end of history” bullshit that convinced people there were no fights left to be had, and that situation is now better. We are more confused now because we are closer to the truth – we have, in at least some sense, stopped lying. This is what has to happen. Getting the ocean without the roar of its many waters is not a real option. The real options are: retreat or advance.

 

  1. From a technical perspective, the reason this can’t work is that you have to write the code before you know what data it’s going to be run against, so you would have to be able to predict what information is going to be true or false before that information has actually been generated, meaning you can’t rely on the details of the information itself, meaning you can’t actually be making a real judgment as to whether it’s “disinformation” or not; you can only be relying on contextual coincidence. And if you try to get around this by using human intervention, all you’ve done is appointed an arbitrary, unaccountable person to act as an arbiter of truth, which is obviously several steps backwards. ↩