This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
Revenge of the Real Politics for a Post-Pandemic World Benjamin Bratton #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
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This is the full transcription of podcast 'Hidden Forces'.
Revenge of the Real Politics for a Post-Pandemic World Benjamin Bratton #Podcast #Transcription #ReadAlong #KnowledgeUnlocked
What's up, everybody? My name is Dimitri Kofinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and to learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this week's episode is Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at UC San Diego and the author of a recently published book titled Revenge of the Real, Politics for a Post-Pandemic The book explores how our collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates a critical inability on the part of society to govern itself. The pandemic in this sense serves as a sort of non-negotiable reality check that appends the comfortable illusions of a world that increasingly bears no resemblance to the one we have vacated. It's a conversation that raises important questions about not only how we came to find ourselves in our current predicament of mask wars, urban riots, and institutional decay, but also (1/42)
how we might go about constructing a world that is more representative of reality and the needs of the present moment. This part of the discussion continues into the overtime, where Benjamin and I explore what a post-pandemic world might look like and what this means for our conceptions of governance and the individual. So without any further ado, I bring you my conversation with philosopher and author Benjamin Bratton. Benjamin Bratton, welcome to Hidden Forces. Thanks for having me. It's great having you on. So you and I have spoken briefly by phone and just now I've read your book this weekend. I think the entire framing of the book is fascinating and it touches on a lot of the topics that I've raised on prior episodes of Hidden Forces. Before we get into the book, I'd love for you to describe yourself because you're a rather eclectic guy. You seem to have, you don't fit into a box, not even close. So I'm curious how you describe yourself and what are your interests? What drives (2/42)
you? Well, to admit, I sometimes have a hard time describing myself in this sense. I suppose really I'm a writer. I write a number of books of nonfiction, primarily focused on issues of philosophy, computer science, design and architecture, geopolitics, various mixtures of these. So kind of depending on the audience, different things come to the fore. I'm a professor at University of California, San Diego. I also taught at Syark in Los Angeles. I direct an urban futures think tank at the Strelka Institute. In Moscow, the current iteration of which is called the terraforming, which is not the terraforming of Mars or the moon to make them suitable for earth-like life, but rather the terraforming of the earth to ensure that it remains viable for earth-like life. The new book that you mentioned that comes out this week is about the pandemic and what happened, what we need to learn from it, what was exposed in essence, how to make sense of it. So what led you to write the book? Was it the (3/42)
pandemic or was the subject brewing in your head long before that? Yeah, probably just some extent. I mean, the book really is a book of political philosophy more than a kind of policy blueprint. The book emerged from an essay that was published quite relatively early in the pandemic in March or April called 18 Lessons of Quarantine Urbanism. And I suppose in terms of what led me to write it, I think a lot of us who have friends and colleagues in China were watching what was happening and felt a little bit of a Cassandra complex that we knew what was coming. We were watching the administrations and maybe our friends and colleagues sort of sitting on their hands and various things sort of had come to pass. And so it became clear to me that in many regards that instead of thinking of the pandemic simply as a kind of state of exception and aberration from the norm, it really was a kind of episode by which a number of let's say pre-existing conditions were exposed, kind of added old adage (4/42)
of when the tide goes out, we can see who was swimming naked. And it turns out it was not just a few people, but in many respects, an entire system of healthcare, an entire logic within philosophy, an entire logic of biopolitical critique that ended up being enormously unhelpful in thinking through what the pandemic was, what our responses might be. And perhaps on the most deepest level, a kind of crisis in the logic and culture of governance, particularly in the West, that among the most richest and technologically sophisticated countries in the world were found themselves basically helpless for reasons that were unnecessary and should hopefully never be repeated. So how much of this book is a critique of Western political culture and what you termed to be its philosophical shortcomings? And how much of it also applies to Eastern Asian countries, some of which perhaps did much better under lockdown? Well, to some extent, I think it would be a mistake to make two gross generalizations. (5/42)
Clearly, the country, I mean, the way I put it is like this. One of the ways to think about the pandemic was that we all sort of lived through involuntarily, the largest control experiment in comparative governance that we're likely to see. The virus was the control variable and different policy regimes, but also different political cultures were tested. And the results are plain to see. Can we measure deaths per 100,000 and any number of other things you may wish to look at? And the countries that did the best, perhaps Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, some others, are Asian technocracies that were able to respond quickly, partially because they had experiences with SARS because they had a kind of equitable, inclusive, and effective public health institutions. And they have a kind of political culture that is well suited to a capacity for collective self-organization. And quite clearly, certain kinds of policy decisions and policy instruments that were deployed in Taiwan, for example, (6/42)
simply wouldn't have been culturally possible in Texas or Southern Italy or Brazil or Italy. And that if the Asian technocracies, to a certain extent, may have done well, and I'm not in any respect trying to gloss over the problems in China's response, for example, but the countries that did the worst were clearly the ones that were run by the wave of populist regimes that had taken power over the last decade, United States, Brazil, India, I've mentioned, the UK, Russia. And that one of the lessons to be drawn from this, which should have been obvious, is that populist politics emphasis on narrative, on cultural narrative, the idea that a constructed narrative as a way of understanding how the world works, how political power might be organized, simply doesn't work. That ultimately, an underlying reality, a biological reality, a biochemical reality, an epidemiological reality that is indifferent to social construction will ultimately have its day. And I think that's what we saw. How (7/42)
much of the impediments that were erected, let's say, by populist regimes, were the result of cultural factors? And how much were simply the fact that these regimes or these administrations or candidates came to power by directly delegitimizing or pointing to the inefficiencies or corruptions of the existing institutions, and that therefore, in their response, it was very difficult to consistently corral the population to follow the administered line? That's right. It's a vicious circle in the logic of populism. And you may say that there's a kind of... I mean, the way I would see it is that over the last generation or so, 40 years, there has been a... From the beginning of neoliberalism, there has been a kind of deliberate dismantling and deconstruction of the principle of governance, both on the right and on the left, as a kind of something that should be seen with a kind of permanent suspicion. This dismantling of governance makes governance ineffective. That governance becomes (8/42)
ineffective, governance becomes delegitimized. That governance becomes delegitimized. This gives, as you suggest, oxygen to populism of all sorts. The dysfunction of government is in and of itself an excuse for further delegitimization and deconstruction of the systems of government, which then make it even more dysfunctional, which increase... It's a vicious cycle. Yeah. More vicious than virtuous. That's right. That's right. And so you end up with the situation in which with populations that are for both legitimate and probably illegitimate reasons are less able to collectively self-organize, find themselves in a situation where that collective self-organization is impossible and we have body count to prove it. So I'm curious. I mean, you're touching on it and we'll get into it later in the conversation as well. Where did the title of the book come from? Can you speak a little bit more to what you mean? The Revenge of the Real. Right. When you talk about the real. Well, the real is, (9/42)
as I say, is that kind of underlying biological, physical, material, epidemiological reality that is indifferent to cultural projection, indifferent to social construction, indifferent to our narrativizations. We are part of it. It's us. But whether we're talking about a pandemic, we're talking about climate change, we're talking about any number of ways in which the underlying biochemistry of our planetary condition is, in essence, bursting through the seams of the narrative illusions that we all try to use to make sense of the world around us. This suppression of the real, which is again is, I think, central to this project, can only last for so long. And that the law, you know, when you think of it sort of a boiling pot, the more that it is suppressed, the more that it is ignored, the more that our preferred illusions take up the time and space that should be used to kind of address the world as it is, the more damaging and the more violent that eruption actually is. So besides (10/42)
COVID-19 or infectious disease, what are some of the other forms of the real that the pandemic has forced us to confront? And how important is the fear of death and our societies, I think, really unhealthy relationship to mortality? How does that factor into all of this? And I'm reminded of the experience of the United States of the citizenry to the attacks of 9-11. And without minimizing how scary those attacks were, I also want to emphasize that I think our reaction to them was exaggerated. And it was, in some ways, a reaction that was politically beneficial for the administration at the time, which stoked fears and concerns. But people also did have an exaggerated fear of death, death, something which is inevitable and which we all will face at one point or another. And then all we can do is prolong it for a very short period of time and get people are willing to go to great lengths to forestall or perhaps even in their head, if they can imagine it, prevent it entirely. So how did (11/42)
this pandemic bring out our fears around mortality and morbidity? Well, it's a fascinating question. I think that in terms of linking with 9-11, which is an interesting one, I suppose the way in which I might approach it has to do with the ways in which we understand where risk really is and what really is a risk, what really is something that may result in our death, which is something that might be dangerous to us. And what, on the other hand, is something in which we invest and organize our fear of death. And these are not always the same thing. I think to your point, obviously, in the years after 9-11, the question of trying to reorganize our society and reorganize our cities, reorganize our airports, reorganize our schools in relationship to the threat of political terrorism became a national project. It was a refortification against a presumed and predictive and possible speculative future violence, one that was extraordinarily unlikely compared to, for example, dying of heart (12/42)
disease, dying of lung cancer, dying of any of the kinds of things that Americans tend to die of, diabetes and so forth and so on. And so there is a sense of risk, and then there's a sense of where a place where risk is actually invested. I think with the pandemic, this kind of miscalculation of risk that we saw that was probably most pervasive was not the kind of being afraid of shark attacks kind of risk that we saw after 9-11 where there was a kind of, all of our attention on the wrong thing. It was more about a miscalculation of the relationship between individual risk and collective risk. And I think this was kind of the last of the pandemic. One of the things that the pandemic showed was that many of the risks that any of us may face personally are really our collective risks, that if someone in my city is infected, is sick, or if several people in my city are infected or sick, that this is a risk to me. And that my investment in care for them, my investment in testing for them, (13/42)
my investment in the provision of appropriate healthcare for them is to my benefit. There was a meme going around, around sort of in the middle of the culture war over masks that was about someone who refused to turn on their headlights as they were driving around the city because they could see everybody else. They have the freedom to drive their car on the road so forth and so on. I think that part of the culture war over the mask was where this issue of risk really became and the kind of calculations and miscalculations of risk really came to bear. So this is an interesting part of the book where you couch this observation in terms of the subject versus object as well as our over-individuation. Explain to me what you mean by that. How does our conception of the immunological commons and our conception of individuality interface with the realities of the world and the fact that so many of the risks we face are communal as opposed to individual? I mean, they affect us individually, (14/42)
but they are macro risks. That's right. Well, one of the things I talk about is what I call the ethics of the object, which we might contrast to an ethics of the subject. In political ethics or really ethics more broadly, there is a presumption that one's subjectivity is the basis of this ethical discussion. Put simply, if I can calibrate my internal moral state, my sort of mental disposition towards you or to the world in a particular kind of way and train this and discipline this towards the proper ethical disposition, then my activities, my behaviors and the effects of my activities and behaviors will be somehow correspondent to this internal moral state. If I think good thoughts, I will do good things. If I do good things, then good things will happen. Intentions matter, in other words. Intentions not only matter, intentions are the thing that matters. The focus for ethics is on the calibration of intentionality. That's what I would say is the inherited sense of ethics of the (15/42)
subject. By contrast, what I suggest is the ethics of the object that must be added to this, not necessarily replace it, but added to this. The reason we wore masks was because we came to a different kind of ethical realization, whether we realized it or not. When I approach a stranger in the street, we're both wearing a mask, the possibility that I might infect them, do them harm, do them a kind of potentially serious form of violence, has nothing to do with whether or not I like them or hate them or know them or don't know them or have. My internal subjective moral state towards this person is totally irrelevant to whether or not my actions will do them harm. My actions will do them harm because of an objective biological reality that we are part of the same species, that there is a virus that my exhale is their inhale and so forth. We wore masks because we were able to recalibrate a logic of ethics towards one's self as an object, one's self as a biological object, and to construct (16/42)
a kind of public ethics around this reality. We were able to do it relatively quickly and to activate this relatively quickly. This too, I think, is one of the positive lessons from the sociologic of the pandemic. Not that I think we should all continue to wear masks forever and ever, but more generally, this sense of understanding ourselves in relationship to the world through this lens of the objective, to think of the objective as a space of ethics rather than as a kind of space of over-rationalizing tyranny against ethics is, in fact, something that's very important. So how much of this reflects an evolved understanding of ethics in your view? And how much of it is actually a result of fundamentally new dynamics on the planet as a result of not just population changes, but also changing ecosystems as a result of some of those population changes and practices, etc. How much is the ethics of the object? How much is the pandemic itself? No, not the pandemic itself. How much is the (17/42)
ethics of the object on evolved understanding? And how much of it is not so much an evolved understanding? You could still say it's an evolved understanding, but the circumstances of the earth and of human society on planet earth are different than they were a thousand years ago. Where there are more people, we have different types of technologies, different types of wastes, different types of problems. That's right. So how much of this is a philosophy for the current age? Well, I think it is a philosophy of the current age, but I think that if it is an evolved understanding, it is an evolved understanding of a condition and circumstance that in a way always has been. We always have been a kind of biological creature. Unwitting agents in all sorts of harmful dramas. Unwitting agents, exactly. Unwitting agents, unconscious objects in a certain kind of degree. The way in which I would couch this in a bigger picture, and I'm not sure the ethics of the object would qualify of this, but (18/42)
this kind of what you call a kind of evolved perspective. Another way of putting that might be in relationship to what I call in some other work, the Copernican Trauma or Copernican Turn. There are moments in, and this goes to your question about the technological aspect of this. There's moments in history, in sort of socio-technical history where we use technology in a certain way that allows us not just to do something in the world, but to discover that the world works very differently than we thought, the technology that we use to make it. So a telescope or a microscope, without telescopes, a heliocentric cosmology isn't really possible. Without microscopes, don't cause microbes, but once you understand that the surfaces of the world are covered with them, you see them differently. I think Darwinian biology was a kind of Copernican Trauma, neuroscience by which we understand ourselves as an animal that our most beautiful forms of cognition are also animal forms. Neuroscience, where (19/42)
our thinking about our thinking and understanding that to itself as a physical objective fact, this is marvelous. I think artificial intelligence and what I call synthetic intelligence will also prove to be a kind of Copernican Trauma, but there are a number of different sequences along the way by which we come to understand, in essence, the objectivity of our subjectivity in ways that change the way we understand the world. Most of them, most of them were able to be accomplished through some form of technological abstraction and alienation. The technology was essential to these kinds of epistemological transformations. To that point, let's reverse that a bit. How much is our subjective notion of self and personal identity formed by similar types of models and frameworks that we bring to the world? Well, this is a big question to the extent to what sense of our sense of self is part of a neuroanatomical disposition. Exactly, right. That agreeing to structural language and process (20/42)
lights and sounds in particular kinds of ways, all those, you can't separate a sense of self from that. Those things are themselves not givens. They are the result. I would make this point. We have always been technological creatures in a certain sense, and that even our anatomy itself is the result and effects of millions of years of technological mediation with the world. We have opposable thumbs, not so that we can pick up tools, but because our ancestors picked up tools. Our thumbs work the way that we do. This question of to what extent are we a biological given that then enters into social relations and mediations with the world, and to what extent do those mediations and social relations with the world produce that biological condition is a bit of a, I would say, chicken or egg situation, though obviously, we know that eggs came before chickens by several million years, so it doesn't really hold. It's a dynamic process, in other words, that our conceptions of the world and our (21/42)
biologies, those are constantly evolving. But what I'm trying to wean out though here is that, yes, our sensory perceptions allow our individual beings to process information individually, but that's not the same thing. Right, but that's not the same thing as our conception of self and our sense of identity and ego. That's right. So how much of that would you say is kind of running as a piece of software as opposed to being hardwired in a biology, that if a different type of culture existed in the world, that you could take the same biologically evolved human beings, but those individuals could operate in a world where with far less ego, far less sense of self. I mean, there are all sorts of theories, one of them, obviously, I think generally discredited from the 1970s, Jillian James' bicameral mind, but that posited that the ancients actually had far less or lacked an ego entirely and had a relationship to the gods that was really a sort of an expression of their internal bicamerality (22/42)
between their conscious and unconscious mind. So that's kind of what I'm getting at, which is it seems to me when I read your book that what you're suggesting is that given the state of the world, given where our technology's at, etc., etc., part of what the solution means is moving to a world where we think of ourselves less as individuals and more as part of a collective. And so what does that mean experientially and qualitatively for a human being living in the world? Yeah, thanks for the question. Let me put it this way. There are a lot of ways in which one might experience one's own subjectivity, one's own agency, one's own identity. I think we are at a sort of weird cultural moments in the West where all three of these things are thought of as basically being more or less the same thing and they're not. And so if one has a sense that one's agency is insufficient, one might choose to amplify one's sense of identity or subjectivity. And I think in ways that we could go into, this (23/42)
has led to a number of problems, including the populist wave that I was speaking to. Now to your question about the hardware software aspect of this, which is a kind of interesting one, we think through many as homo sapiens, we think linguistically, we think visually, of course, we think auditorially, we think in lots of different ways, but language both spoken and written in the last several tens of thousands of years has become an increasingly central part of how it is that we think language itself is obviously deeply social and trans individual at its foundations. For me to even think about my own, you know, independence and autonomy, I'm thinking about this through the grammars and structures of a language that is already trans individual. And so the conditions of that sense of subjectivity, that's not the same thing as autonomy, but let's say that sense of autonomy is itself constructed through a non autonomous technology. I don't know that this is a paradox, but it is certainly (24/42)
an important way to appreciate this. You know, in terms of consciousness, which is something that I know a lot of people are very concerned about, I happen to be particularly in my recent work around AI and synthetic intelligence, I've become less focused and interested in consciousness per se. But it's a neuroscientist at Princeton named Graziano, whose work on the social theory of consciousness I find rather compelling. And basically his idea goes like this, is that in all predator-prey relationships, there was some kind of capacity for other mind projection, that the fox can imagine how the eagle sees. And so it knows to go under and hide because it's imagining a line of sight from above or to catch a fox, you need to think like a fox in this way. So there's some kind of undermined capacity to anticipate what the other person's thinking. What's happened is that one of the things that makes our sapiens, whatever, 60,000, 40,000, where we want to sort of locate this, we're able to in (25/42)
essence turn that other mind capacity back in on ourselves. We were able to think of ourselves as if we were an other mind, as if we were an external kind of structure. And it's this interiorization of what began as an exterior relationship to the world that probably took a great lesson in the basis of this sense of subjectivity in the first place. I don't fully follow that last part. First of all, what are we talking about when we say consciousness number one? And where you lost me was in the turning consciousness in on itself, that somehow the human version of consciousness or expression of it is somehow different than that of, let's say, a predator or a prey. It is. I mean, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make it obscure. That's fine. But so yeah, first of all, what do we mean when we talk about consciousness and then what is that distinction? So consciousness in this sense would be this experience of one's own, this sort of subjective experiences of one's own thoughts. So thinking (26/42)
about thinking, let's say, the capacity to not only think anthropocriticities, but to think about thinking and perhaps to think about thinking about thinking in these terms of this. A larger sense of cosmic awareness? Well, a larger sense of a kind of reflexive awareness of one's own sentience. Like we might separate sentience from sapience in this regard. Yeah, because I wouldn't necessarily connect consciousness with ego or identity, which is where I think I'm getting a little confused. Are you putting those two together? No, I'm not. I was suggesting that since you were talking, we were talking about this in terms of the relationship of the kind of evolutionary arc by which these might develop in relationship to one another, that we may want to sort of ask the question of how infected this come about and where was this kinds of moments of switches? There's another point that we may want to consider in terms of the ancients. And of course, I think what we mean by the ancients here is (27/42)
maybe not entirely clear. I think it was the oral societies, preliterate societies, I think is what... Yeah, I'm not sure this argument is necessarily borne by the record. One way to think about this is there's this caves, the Neolithic caves, or one is being at Lascaux. One is at Chauvet in France and others at Lascaux. The one at Chauvet is about 32,000 years old. The one at Lascaux, which we had studied much longer, was about 16,000 years old. And so the distance, the historical record between the present Lascaux and Chauvet are all about 16,000 years. The Wehrner Herzog film that you might be familiar with is at Chauvet at the beginning. And one of things you see in the art that happens there is that there's a representation of animals and a representation of the world around these ancestors of ours. Everything is represented sort of in a kind of horizontal movement. But at Lascaux, 16,000 years later, there's this huge shift where things meet your gaze. The animal looks at you in (28/42)
the eye. There are pictures of people that will return to look at you in the eye. And so whoever made those was able to imagine that in the future, not in the present, there would be someone else who's looking at this picture who will have a gaze that will be observing this picture in the future and that can make this picture. Now, I can meet that future gaze through this image. There's a lot going on there. And so some have suggested that this kind of some kind of light bulb went on during this particularly recent period that allowed for this kind of anticipation of a kind of futural consciousness as being something to which and from which a kind of communication is possible. This is more what I would refer to more generally as the capacity for sapiens rather than as necessarily consciousness. But I think it nevertheless gets to the heart of the phenomenon that we're trying to hone in on here. So is the phenomenon, because I think you kind of mentioned it before we got to this point, (29/42)
which is that individuation, though it was something that was that evolved as a sort of an adaptive way of interfacing with the world, has at this stage become a kind of malignancy. No, no, no, no, no. Let me try to introduce a little bit of specificity into this as well. The individuation and the sense of individuation that I'm speaking of, the kind of would identify as a kind of particular, at this point, has become a kind of potentially rather malignant trait of some aspects of Western political culture is not the capacity for sapiens, is not the capacity for a kind of projective or futural or speculative intersubjectivity. That might identify with this in the cave scenario. That the scenario of the kind of projective intersubjectivity or projective interobjectivity is closer to what I was talking about the ethics of the object. However, what I'm speaking to in the book about the kind of crisis of individuation or kind of malignant forms of individuation, in many cases, a kind of (30/42)
suppression or forgetting of that basis of subjectivity in which a kind of fantastically fragile fiction of a self-sovereign, autonomous individual is understood as a kind of ontological principle, as the basis of how society works itself. That not just the relatively dubious sort of conventional liberal discussion that a society is made up of essentially of individuals that subsequently choose to enter into social contracts, but even further than that, that they don't really even enter into these social contracts, that they simply are these kinds of encapsulated atomized selfish automatons bouncing off one each other like billiard balls, acting in their intensive self-interest in ways that are clearly motivated by any number of cultural motivations. This is the individuation that I speak of in the book as being particularly troublesome. Right. A principle of emergence that through all of our competing self-interest, whether it's in the marketplace or in the political sphere, through (31/42)
that process emerges a kind of order, a hidden order, and that the world that we live in today results from the competing impulses and self-interests of these automata. What you're suggesting is, and you're not the only one, I mean, this is, I think I've talked about this a bit in the context of one episode where we explored the foundations of Protestantism and the Reformation. Right. Max Weber and so forth. Right, exactly. It's not a controversial view to take, but the reason I was bringing it up was because it does seem like one of the conclusions you draw is that if we want to transition to a more sustainable world and a world in which we can live, given, I think, the state of our technology, the capacities for both destruction and creation that these technologies allow, that we need to be able to get to a place where this hyper-individuation ceases to be, that we roll it back somehow. I think I've seen this, for example, what I consider to be hyper-individuation in terms of (32/42)
narcissism, like the outgrowth of narcissism in society. I don't know if that's what you mean, but I suppose try and clarify what I just said because I don't have obviously the same- Yeah, you know, I'm happy to, yeah, no, and I think there's consider an overlap in what we're suggesting here. The question of emergence and order is an important aspect of this, and I'm not suggesting that the principle of the internal dynamics of complex adaptive systems that are not directed, that there is not only a capacity for the emergence of bottom-up order, but that this is one of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems themselves, whether those are physical or social or cultural linguistic. I think this is indisputable. However, there are one of the other emergent properties of those systems, which I think goes back to this question of to sentience and sapiens. One of the emergent properties of those systems can also be the capacity for self-modeling, that the entire system itself (33/42)
becomes in a way capable of modeling itself and deliberately acting back upon itself, that there becomes a capacity for certain kind of deliberate and deliberative recursion within that system, that there is emergence and then this emergence also has a kind of, let's say, a kind of second or third order cybernetic capacity for a feedback and recursion. This is also a form of intelligence. This is also a form of collective sapiens, not just individual sapiens, but a kind of collective sapiens. It implies foresight. It implies regulation. It implies structuring. It implies composition. This itself is a reflex, a capacity of which we are very capable, but have to a certain extent lost some expertise in. When I speak of the kind of crisis of governance in the West, this is really what I mean. What I mean is that we have lost this ability really to perform these feats of recursive regulatory compositional structure. Again, it's not that emergence isn't real or emergence is important, but (34/42)
one of the things that also should emerge is this capacity for recursion. How much is it that the capacity for recursion is inadequate or diminished? How much of it is that the map of the territory is no longer accurate, that the simulation that we're running of the real of reality has increasingly become unmoored from reality itself, and that this is what we are experiencing and that this is what the pandemic brought to the fore. Yeah. No, we're on the same page here. I think it's both. And both meaning that both the model of the real that we are producing is inadequate to the purposes of this recursion. And also, after 40 years, 50 years of kind of deliberate dismantling and deconstruction of the principle of governmentality itself, the impetus or inclination to enter into this recursion itself is atrophy to a certain kind of degree. So a couple questions there. One, what do you attribute to that, to the unmooring, to the increasing disconnect between the simulation and reality, or (35/42)
the simulation as an appropriate model of what reality is so that we can act upon in an effective way? And two, is the attack on institutions or the deconstruction of the systems of self-governance, et cetera, do those result in part from, actually, I'll just pose it as a question. What does that result from? But take the first one first, if you don't mind. Yeah, let me take the first one because I think what you've hit upon here is an important point. It might be worth sort of walking it through a little bit. So we have a tremendous capacity for producing incredibly rich models and simulations of the past, present, and future. Our capacity to produce these models as forms of technical abstraction is not atrophied whatsoever. I think probably, if nothing else, earth science and climate science are exemplary of this, I will make the argument that the very idea of climate change itself, not the phenomenon, but the concept of it, is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary scale (36/42)
computation without this massive planetary scale sensing and modeling and computation capacity that takes billions and billions of data points and produces model simulations of earth, past, present, and future through them. Simple heuristics like a hockey stick don't occur. But to your point, like we see with our science, the problem now is not really that the models are not accurate enough. Like if we could just get this out to 17 decimal points instead of seven decimal points, then we would have a better bottle of it. We would know what to do. No, what's happened is that model of the world, of what the future, this collective model of what the likely future of our ecological substrate, upon which all of our economies from which they emerge is in danger, that model itself does not have the capacity to have an effective recursive effect back on the real. The climate model cannot recursively affect the climate in the same way. And that is the problem. We see that in many respects, (37/42)
financial model. Because the climate model is a model of a physical system. Well, it's a model of a physical system. And the institutional structures that we have constructed in relationship to this model are not ones that activate this model as an instrument of governance. It is merely a representation of a possibility. Many financial models, for example, it's a descriptive model as opposed to a prescriptive one. It's a descriptive model as opposed to a recursive one. Is it as opposed to a recursive one? So many financial models are recursive in ways that climate models are not, in that financial models can in fact cause the thing to happen that they are modeling. Donald McKenzie's book, An Engine, Not a Camera on the History of Sock Exchanges, kind of towards this. So that's the second part of your point, where there's a problem or crisis, if you like. There's this mismatch between we have this tremendous technological capacity to produce models of the world and this tiny little (38/42)
T-Rex arm capacity to actually use those models to recursively act back upon the world in a way that would make those models tools of governance. The first part though about are the models, we're making the wrong kind of models. This is also true and this, I think, does to go to a certain degree goes to the question of this question of individuation and the question of what I would consider a kind of historically catastrophic misuse of our computational capacity towards the tracking and modeling and simulation of individual user behavior, individual consumer behavior that has amplified not only this kind of model of society as being an aggregation of atomic atomized individuals, but has amplified and accelerated that atomization even further and has even structured its own critique. That even the critique of surveillance capitalism from Shoshana Zuboff or others is predicated on the idea that of course computation is about modeling individuals, but now what needs to happen instead of (39/42)
these coercive contractual relationships between individuals and predatory platforms, these individuals must counter-weaponize themselves and take back their individual private data. The problem, however, is this hyperindividuation of the use of computation itself as if the individual human were the proper unit of analysis for how it is that the computation would model the world. Unless this is in a sense, is sort of repurposed towards things that are more beneficial, I don't think any amount of kind of political solutionism that we might get from the surveillance capitalism critique is going to be very helpful. It also seems to speak to a larger sense of consciousness for a planet that can view itself and act upon itself in a way that is simply not possible at the individual level. I want to move the second part of our conversation into the overtime, Benjamin, and that's going to give us an opportunity to really talk about what a post-pandemic world would look like if we were to (40/42)
implement some of these solutions that you feel are needed and what it would look like if we didn't. In other words, what is the sort of path of least resistance if things continue to move as they are today and what this means in both cases for the nation-state. We've talked about it a bit for the individual, for corporations, and for I think peace security and quality of life. For anyone who is new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener-supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second part of today's conversation with Benjamin, as well as the transcripts and rundowns to this episode and every other episode we've ever done, head over to hiddenforces.io and check out our episode library, or subscribe directly through our Patreon page at patreon.com slash hiddenforces. There's also a link in the summary page to this episode with instructions on how to connect the overtime (41/42)
feed to your phone so that you can listen to these extra discussions just like you listen to the regular podcast. Benjamin, stick around, we're going to move the rest of our conversation into the overtime. Every episode, check out our premium subscription available through the Hidden Forces website or through our Patreon page at patreon.com slash hiddenforces. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. Join the conversation at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Hidden Forces Pod, or send me an email at dk at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. (42/42)