Dolphins into the dark, or; why we – perhaps – cease to understand the world... ...more than ever? (Friday fragments)
due to the complexities of the New Dark Age; in a world of “deliriously multiple viewpoints"; due to the global division of labour, and a global job market that rewards ‘data worshippers’
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Planet Earth is blue
and there’s nothing I can do
~
Oh Heaven
Heaven is a place
a place where nothing
nothing ever happens
~
I want you
– the truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark
it scares you witless
but in time you see things true and stark
~
I’m playing with an intuition I have, which I am not the first to have. It is this, thus:
We know less; we understand less of the world than we ‘did’.
This is already chok full of assumptions, and immediately prompts counterfactuals:
did we ever understand the world?
‘Since when’ was this the case, and can you point me to this golden age in which ‘we’ (but who’s we?) understood anything much?
Is this not a perennial issue facing human knowledge... and are we not better placed than we were in the known past to confront this and push into the darkness with better ‘flashlights’ (now using LEDs, and with longer lasting batteries) than we were in the age of the Eveready Dolphin?
...yes, that all may be true, but I’m not so sure... to me, it would appear that the black boxes and Rumsfeldian (un)knowns are proliferating... but again, how do I *know* this (like: especially if things are descending into a dark cloud of unknowing)?
Confronted with this epistemological morass, I can only proceed with my hunch... one way of getting a handle on it, is by looking at what some diverse and interesting thinkers have said about this.
As this is a ‘Friday’ post (thus something of a follow up and reflection to the ‘usual Tuesday’ I’m trying for), I’ll forgo the bulk of my analytic riffing, and try to say in fewer words what my doubt or question or interest is about each thesis?
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1) the ‘complexity’ argument: (as) the world is getting more complex, (so) we understand it less and less
The following is copy/pasted from the blurb to James Bridle’s New Dark Age
“As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world.
In actual fact, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age.
From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation”.
Question: is the world around us increasing in technological complexity, actually? And how does this matter in the face of the ecological and material complexities of the cosmos, of which we know more than ever, that we have always been subject to (and see below for Smil’s take on this?
Are we not reifying the complexity of our own technology (ICT, and especially surveillance capitalism and AI) in order to (yet again!) give ‘fear focus’ to a set of diffuse worries, when our more pressing issues are more prosaic, and our ‘agencies’ still constrained in the usual-mundane ways: Pakistan under water, Somalia experiencing famine, New South Wales on fire (2019-20) or under water (2022), Tokyo or Wellington destroyed by earthquake (202?)?
Is the ‘worry’ about AI just another example of ‘Whitey on the Moon’? I don’t think so… not ‘for all of us, eventually’…
…however… by the time we get to Smil, below…. is it… shouldn’t we *also* be thinking about nitrogen depletion in soils a bit more? That other darkness? And potable water?
Against this,I think of Bridle’s confession of the – deep and sincere – feelings animating his passions, at the end of his intro chapter:
“Writing about the new dark age, even if I can leaven it with networked hope, is not pleasant. It requires saying things that we would rather leave unsaid, thinking things that we would rather keep unthought. Doing so often leaves one with a hollow feeling in the gut, a kind of despair. And yet to fail to do so will be to fail to acknowledge the world as it is, to continue to live in fantasy and abstraction. I think of my friends, and the things we say to one another when we are being honest, and, at some level, how frightened it makes us feel. There is a kind of shame in speaking about the exigencies of the present, and a deep vulnerability, but it must not stop us thinking. We cannot fail each other now”(16).
~
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
~
the ‘shadows’ of transparency argument: all will be seen, but nothing will be True, there will be only partial lower-case t truths, and this *means* “deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness”
Stepping back in/to (William Gibson’s) time a little, to his past, to 2003, which – twenty years on – is still a present for us and present to us:
“In the age of the leak and the blog, of evidence extraction and link discovery, truths will either out or be outed, later if not sooner. This is something I would bring to the attention of every diplomat, politician, and corporate leader: The future, eventually, will find you out. The future, wielding unimaginable tools of transparency, will have its way with you. In the end, you will be seen to have done that which you did*.
I say ‘truths’, however, and not ‘truth’, as the other side of information’s new ubiquity can look not so much transparent as outright crazy. Regardless of the number and power of the tools used to extract patterns from information, any sense of meaning depends on context, with interpretation coming along in support of one agenda or another. A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily... (170)
...Dystopias are no more real than utopias. None of us ever really inhabits either – except, in the case of dystopias, in the relative and ordinary tragic sense of life in some extremely unfortunate place” (171).
To me, this is intuitively more appealing than the ‘technology is getting more complex... ’ argument... human meaning is (and can be only) made in context (see Gibson below), and interpretations are always made according to the shifting, shifty interests of concrete groups.
*Even* the 2000s Angloliberal fantasy of transparency – which was, of course, being tethered to Gitmo and Abu Ghraib at the very moment Gibson was thinking in ‘03, and would be tied to WikiLeaks (Collateral Murder was released in 2010) and Snowden (NSA leaks were 2013) within the decade from 2003 – produces the multiplication of partial ‘truths’, proliferating like viruses, especially when they’re about viruses (ask any plandemic or scamdemic conspiracy theorist). Thus we cannot escape a basic epistemological situation of ‘deliriously multiple viewpoints’, and we cannot know the whole (or even the void).
*and*… life these days *really does a number* on context.
(Reading The Peripheral [2014], I can really see how Gibson tried to enact this murkiness. Great book, just push through the first 70 pages, they make no sense at first…)
However, bringing 2010s Bridle against 2000s Gibson: is it not precisely the case that the 2000s pursuit of transparency through networked ICT produced a great dark cloud of unknowing, by the 2010s (and, like, it wasn’t ‘supposed to’… but Gibson could already see it might, by 2003?)?
Are we not now living in a paradoxical world of more information-transparency in which we know-and-understand less than we used to?
Against Bridle against Gibson: plus ca change? Ie: was this not something that Arendt was already having Arant about in the 60s in Crises of the Republic, as I raised in Tuesday’s post?
So by extension, isn’t the problem of failure to know about the perennial failure to think, which is also the failure to conceive and imagine, which is also due to the weakness of basic curiosity and nous, which, in our society, is also partly about how attention is lured and captured... including by these technologies of ‘transparency’?)
Most of us these days have a ‘deeply superficial’ understanding of the world, because we’re specialists working in the service economies of huge global cities, and we’re completely disconnected from food and energy production and its distribution – and because we have this weird fantasy of immaterialisation and data worship, and this is also where a lot of the cool high paid jobs are now, so what do we expect?
And now, to Vaclav Smil, the grumpy old scientist – who I imagine up there somewhere in glider, grumping down on all of us, like Bette Middler’s vision of God in ‘From a Distance’ – here to teach the digitally obsessed and the flaky new materialists and TikToking Zoomer delivery people about proper old school materialism/ materials/ materiality. Some things are slower and heavier than others; many things require fossil fuels; civilisation is built on energy density, okay?!
As for this long block quote: I don’t have that much critical to say about it, except by wondering how its undeniable basic truths are not at all disconnected from what Gibson was saying about information, meaning and context and what Bridle was saying about the New Dark Age (especially the heavy-dirty materiality of the so-called ‘cloud’):
“Why then do most people in modern societies have such a superficial knowledge about how the world really works? The complexities of the modern world are an obvious explanation: people are constantly interacting with black boxes, whose relatively simple outputs require little or no comprehension of what is taking place inside the box. This is as true of such ubiquitous devices as mobile phones and laptops (typing a simple query does the trick) as it is of mass-scale procedures such as vaccination (certainly the best planetary example of 2021, with, typically, the rolling up of a sleeve being the only comprehensible part). But explanations of this comprehension deficit go beyond the fact that the sweep of our knowledge encourages specialisation, whose obverse is an increasingly shallow understanding, even ignorance – of the basics.
Urbanisation and mechanization have been two important reasons for this comprehension deficit. Since the year 2007, morte than half of humanity has lived in cities (more than 80% in all affluent countries), and unlike in the industrializing cities of the 19th andearly 20th centuries, jobs in modern urban areas are largely in services. Most modern urbanites are thus disconnected not only from the ways we produce our food but also from the ways we build our machines and devices, and the growing mechanization of all productive activity means that only a small share of the global population now engages in delivering civilisation’s energy and the materials that comprise our modern world.
America now has only about 3 million men and women (farm owners and hired labour) directly engaged in producing food – people who actually plow the fields, sow the seeds, apply fertilizer, eradicate weeds, harvest the crops (picking fruit and vegetables is the most labor-intensive part of the process), and take care of the animals. That is less than 1 percent of the country’s population, and hence it is no wonder that most Americans have no idea, or only some vague notion, about how their bread or their cuts of meet came to be. Combines harvest wheat – but do they also harvest soy beans or lentils? How long does it take for a tiny piglet to become a pork chop: weeks or years? The vast majority of Americans simply don’t know – and they have plenty of company. China is the world’s largest producer of steel – smelting, casting and rolling nearly a billion tons of it each year – but all of that is done by less than 0.25 percent of China’s 1.4 billion people. Only a tiny percentage of the Chinese population will ever stand close to a blast furnace, or see the continuous casting mill with its red ribbons of hot, moving steel. And this disconnect is the case across the world.
The other major reason for the poor, and declining understanding of those fundamental processes that deliver energy (as food or as fuels) and durable materials (whether metals, non-metallic minerals, or concrete) is that they have come to be seen as old-fashioned– if not outdated – and distinctly unexciting compared to the world of information, data, and images. The proverbial best minds do not go into soil science and do not try their hand at making better cement; instead they are attracted to dealing with disembodied information, now just streams of electrons in myriads of microdevices. From lawyers and economies to code writers and money managers, their disproportionately high rewards are for work completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.
Moreover, many of these data worshippers have come to believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unneccesary. Fields will be displaced by urban high-rise agriculture, and synthetic products will ultimately eliminate the need to grow any food at all. Dematerialization, powered by artificial intelligence, will end our dependence on shaped mases of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without the Earth’s environment: who needs it if we are going to terraform Mars? Of course, these are all not just grossly premature predictions, they are fantasies fostered by a society where fake news has become common and where reality and fiction have comingled to such an extent that gullible minds, susceptible to cult-like visions, believe what keener observers in the past would have mercilessly perceived as borderline or frank delusions (Smil, How the World Really Works, 3-4).
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One of the points of contact for me with ‘all of the above’ is a young person I’m in contact with. They’re considering moving back to their home town, because rent in Melbourne is getting profoundly unaffordable. They’re not alone: a new report, remediated in the papers yesterday, was to the effect that the rental system is broken for tenants and for landlords: not even the rentiers are making a return! Lol.
Relatedly, they’re now working two jobs, one in hospo, the other driving for Uber Eats... here we can see a ‘hamburger with the lot’ comprised of the delivery of energy (as burger calories) using fossil fuel energy, delivered by a person who has to hustle to supplement their income to service the rentier economy of the asset-owning elite, who can’t be bothered getting it themselves (something like the servile service economy of Gorzworld, as I’ve tried to sketch it).
I asked them if they’d read any good novels lately (because they tend to), but they confessed that they’re so tired from life, of late, that they only don’t have any higher-level attention left, and end up getting stuck scrolling TikTok, sometimes for hours: This scratches some kind of weird itch, but leaves them feeling awful... but which they keep returning to, especially when they’re very tired.
This is closer to my problematic, analytically: how can we think about people’s lived experiences in light of ‘all of the above’, and, moreover, in a world where, as I tried to sketch on Tuesday, the dark figures are multiplying like unsafe playgrounds, whether due to
the complexities of the New Dark Age;
because of a decontextualised (thus meaningless or ‘escaping meaning’) world of “deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness”, or
because we have a superficial understanding of the worlds of production and distribution, because we are just specialists and service workers in global cities, hustling to live and scrolling to relax, tyring to get a leg up into a global job market that rewards ‘data worshippers’.
…this is where I want to keep going….