It Need Not Be Like This

Dum Spiro Spero.
 (While I breathe, I hope.)

We would do well, as George Orwell counselled us,
to see the traces of the dystopian world rising  around us,
to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are;
the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination,
never really change.
We can build our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, yet we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, systems that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups.

What may save us is, in Orwell’s words, is
"a dedication to ‘common decency and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this.”

You Woke Up This Morning In A Cyberpunk World

The technology, surveillance, and dystopian  reality are obvious
—but it's it’s the culmination of decades of deliberate governmental erosion.

Where is the president in Blade Runner? Beneath the 1982 film based on Philip Dick's novel "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?"  beneath the neo-noir trappings of genetically engineered human automatons is a story about corporate power over and indifference to life.
A view of  alienation in the face of wealthy indifference to the plight of workers.
Replace the Tyrell Corporation with Amazon or Walmart and reframe the replicants as “essential services,” and suddenly you have a world of workers terrified that their jobs are inherently a death sentence—moving straight from fiction to reality.
 But while Blade Runner is set in the once-distant future of November 2019,  it's resonance is inescapable in so many ways:
Vast corporate power.
Persistent surveillance.
Life finding a way in a time of constant crisis.

Underlying the tale, but perhaps it's most salient feature: an inescapable, painful awareness of politics and of the presence or deliberate absence of government in daily life.

Government, as experienced for much of the 20th century, is largely absent
from the lives of characters in cyberpunk stories. Police are a durable feature,
but government services and functions beyond the security state are absent.
 Yet for all the aggressive visibility of politics in our daily lives, we’re on the cusp of the powerlessness of a cyberpunk future. Cyberpunk speaks to the present because the conditions that inspired cyberpunk remain largely unchanged.

 As the COVID-19 pandemic sweeps through the world, it collides with governments in the West that have spent decades deliberately shedding responsibility, power, and capability.
They have reduced themselves to little more than vestigial organs that coordinate public-private partnerships of civic responsibility.
This intentional gutting of the state began in earnest in the 1980s, and the science fiction of that time—the earliest texts of cyberpunk—imagines what happens when that process is complete.
Cyberpunk is a genre of vast corporate power and acute personal deprivation.
The technologies at the center of it are all means of control, control bought by the wealthy or broken by criminals. Where recourse is available, in whatever small way, it’s through direct actions.
In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, characters interact with the government
either through past military service or in the law literally made manifest in code.
Real power is reserved only for entrenched wealth.
For Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net, politics is visible
but is driven by corporations either bending states to their will
or actively routing around governance.

These dystopias are the logical culmination of a political project designed to fundamentally limit what government can do for people ...
 and expand what it can do for the wealthy.

 “Back in the 1980s, before movies and video games reduced the genre to a mass of unimaginative violence and dim body modification tropes, cyberpunk was the literary movement that was busy projecting our fears about rampant vulture capitalism, media oversaturation, and emerging computer networks into fictional futures,” writes Infinite Detail author and journalist Tim Maughan.
 The 2020s are, in a real, tangible sense, the conclusion of The Long 1980s. Writing in the 1980s, foundational cyberpunk authors were watching as leaders on both sides of the Atlantic pursued a set of political reforms collectively known as neoliberalism. Prioritizing competition in the market above all else, these reforms were fundamentally a political project, aimed at shrinking the public sphere and undoing the commitments to social welfare that had been made in the wake of the chaos, upheaval, and deprivation of the first half of the 20th century.
This neoliberal turn was a project of unmaking the state for individuals and communities and remaking it for capital.

Cyberpunk conjured a world at this end state of neoliberal reorganization.
Islands in the Net features drone warfare launched against data havens at the behest of corporations. In Blade Runner, the profit considerations of multinational companies determine worker personhood. There is more than a little of the Tyrell Corporation’s prudent life expectancy design in how corporations respond to worker protests over a lack of personal protective equipment.
Today, cyberpunk’s anticipated neoliberal end state is nothing more fanciful than life as we know it. What is remarkable is not that writers anticipated how the neoliberal turn would go,
but that 40 years and several international economic crises later, politicians still respond to these crises with solutions that prioritize markets over people.

In the United States, greatly decreasing state capacity has been an ongoing bipartisan project since 1981. Even the Affordable Care Act, itself the flagship bill of the furthest-left administration in the United States in a half-century, is fundamentally built around the market first, with the government obliging humans into participating in that market.
 It is easy to see health care markets warping into what we see in cyberpunk.
The genre is rich with augmented bodies and artificial limbs, available at a steep price—a privilege available to the ultrawealthy or for a tremendous debt that obliges the recipient to a benefactor. It is the promise of the best medical care known to history—and the least affordable means to get it.

 Hospitals across the United States are in bidding wars with wealthy enclaves, black market profiteers, Federal agencies like FEMA, and one another for a finite supply of protective equipment.
At every point where the supply chain is open to market incentives, companies built to prioritize profit exploit the absence of state control, bogarting lab test contracts
and protective mask production lines.

 Cyberpunk portrays a world dominated by an insulated wealthy elite,
catered to by exclusive services  offering premium versions of what governments once offered the public.
In 2019’s Alita: Battle Angel, itself a schlocky adaptation of 1990s cyberjunky manga Gunnm, the upper class literally lives in a floating city, where they receive monthly shipments of exceptional organs harvested from the underclass below.
It’s modern organ transplant disparities blasted to hyperbolic proportions.
 That disparity, extended to all aspects of life, is the end stage of a deliberate political process. Historian Nils Gilman describes this policy as a “plutocratic insurgency,” where the wealthy seek “to carve out de facto zones of autonomy for themselves by crippling the state’s ability to constrain their freedom of (economic) action.” The wealthy do this within elected office and outside it, spending some small portion of their fortunes to ensure politicians meet crises with tax cuts instead of rent freezes.

As the wealthy expand the space where they can act with impunity,
they are aided from below by entrepreneurs of crime. In the void where  governments once offered protection, financial support, and access to medicine instead thrives an alliance of the rich who believe themselves above the law and their accomplices willing to flout the law.
 What might it mean, say, to experience a pandemic knowing that many of the needed medical supplies are getting bought up for personal use by the ultrarich, or captured by the black market and auctioned off to the desperate?
And, more importantly, what happens next, when companies are free to take over functions that in a previous era would have been taken care of by the government?
Amazon’s logistics empire now gets headlines comparing it to the Red Cross, even as warehouse workers protest over lack of personal protective equipment.
While the state of Texas waited until March 31 to issue a stay-at-home order in the face of the pandemic, San Antonio–based H-E-B activated its own Emergency Operations Center on March 4. By contrast, the Pentagon is still waiting for direction on where to send its 2,000 ventilators.
 It is not hard to imagine that after the pandemic, the mishandling of federal resources will be used as a reason to surrender even more state capacity to private companies, which will leave the government even worse equipped to handle whatever crisis comes next.

A significant strategy of the plutocratic insurgency, as enabled by the neoliberal turn, is to intentionally eave the government ill-equipped for a shared crisis. Rationing once-public goods by wealth is a choice societies make, no matter how much market essentialists portray it as natural.
 It is the same logic that deems people ordering goods at home worthy of protection while denying protections to the workers preparing those deliveries.

It is a short hop, skip, and jump from corporations branding the whole of their workforce “essential services” to imagining a future, as envisioned by cartoonist Matt Lubchansky.

One of cyberpunk’s most durable spinoffs is steampunk, which transposes the technological ingenuity and exploration from the imagined near future to an alternate past, from the 21st to the late 19th century. Steam engines and fantastical contraptions aside, it is telling that the conventions of cyberpunk work seamlessly in the Gilded Age. Because  the 2020s are hardly the first era of unaccountable corporate power, or of deprivation and dehumanization in the name of markets and technological progress.

 Escaping a Gilded Age takes more than just clever protagonists who can outwit the cruelties and exploitations of the wealthy few. As insurmountable as the power of robber barons once seemed, cataclysm and political action brought the Gilded Age to a resounding end.

The inoculations against another Gilded Age are found far less in the works of cyberpunk and far more in the Works Progress Administration.

 Escaping a Gilded Age takes an active, collective politics, one that refuses to let governments hide behind algorithms or abdication of responsibility to the market. Without that political movement, we’re not just living in the prologue to a cyberpunk future. We’re living in the first chapter of a "cybourgeoisie"  dystopian reality.

The Search For Meaning In The Post Truth Era

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.” ~ Carl Sagan

This "Post Truth Era" we find ourselves denizens of, is a massive conundrum to me.
It seems obvious that the idea that the truth matters is self-evident,
and it seems bizarre to have to defend it in any debate.
I am truly baffled by what people even mean
when they assert beliefs that have no body of evidence to support them
 as having as much or more credence than actual facts supported by evidence.


I don't really understand why people believe something without necessarily thinking it's true.
My only response is a defense of the philosophical and ethical necessity of prioritizing the truth
 over our imaginings about it.
Obviously the problem with that is, if one has already abandoned reason;
such matters are not on the radar.



We seem to be losing the ability,  or at least the desire;  to prioritize good evidence and critical thinking over ideology and preconception, which includes declining to accept propositions without good evidence, and letting go of conclusions when the evidence doesn't support them.


 I suggest that embracing a healthy degree of skepticism can make our lives happier, healthier and more satisfying. Today there are very real challenges to a skeptical approach to everyday life.
 The rewards make those challenges worth navigating however.

We must all learn to make skepticism a personal discipline.

(Note- I'm writing here about skeptical rigor, I'll be rigorous and point out this piece is anecdotal in nature.  It's not as if I have double-blinded, peer-reviewed, replicated research showing that a skeptical life is a more satisfying life.) 

Making a habit of letting go of beliefs we're attached to, when the evidence contradicts them is not exactly easy, especially when we are bombarded by "information" bubbles that are devoted entirely to disallowing skepticism.  Skepticism probably does not come naturally, and there is a skill set to the matter...it takes practice.
It takes discipline.
Skeptical analysis is a discipline that pays off in specific pragmatic results,
as well as in the broader, deeper, less obviously tangible areas of personal fulfillment.


We live in the era of cognitive dissonance but once you become aware of it, rationalizing it becomes a lot harder. Becoming aware of the cognitive errors skeptics are always always keen to point out, errors like confirmation bias and hindsight bias  and the clustering illusion and so on: once you start noticing them in others, they become a lot harder to ignore in yourself.
Skepticism is both an outward and inward journey.

Caution!

Today there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among the gullible less informed, or willingly ignorant :
climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination.
On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research. This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

If you look at the arguments presented by science deniers, there are commonalities.
First they see no shades of gray.
There is a striking parallel between a type of thinking error involved in many mental health disturbances and the reasoning behind science denial. Black-and-white and all-or-none thinking, is a factor in depression, anxiety, aggression and, especially, borderline personality disorder.
In this type of erroneous cognition, a spectrum of possibilities is divided only into two parts, with a blurring of distinctions within those categories. Shades of gray are missed; everything is considered either black or white. Dichotomous thinking is not always wrong, but it is a poor tool for understanding complicated realities because these usually involve spectrums of possibilities, not binaries!

Spectrums are sometimes split in very asymmetric ways, with one-half of the binary much larger than the other. For example, perfectionists categorize their work as either perfect or unsatisfactory; good and very good outcomes are lumped together with poor ones in the unsatisfactory category. For example  people with borderline personality disorder perceive people they interact with as either all good or all bad, so one behavior that may be offensive catapults the relationship from the good to the bad category. It’s like a pass/fail grading system in which 100 percent correct earns a P and everything else gets an F.
Reality is just not like that.

Science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims.
In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy.
Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean
that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt,
regardless of the amount of  abundant supportive evidence.
Logic determines the relative truth of a thing. There can never actually be an absolute.
And this is why this kind of thinking is erroneous.

Similarly, deniers perceive the spectrum of scientific agreement as divided into two unequal parts: perfect consensus and no consensus at all. Any departure from 100 percent agreement is categorized as a lack of agreement, which is misinterpreted as indicating fundamental controversy in the field.



Proof exists in mathematics, but not in science.
Research builds knowledge in progressive increments.
As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but is no final end point to the process.

Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have. I am always amazed at the need these folks express for 100% proof in scientific matters when the vast majority of them believe in superstitions wholly ( or holy?) which have no evidence whatsoever of being so.  Selective cognition?

I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action.
Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial.
Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

For example, climate change skeptics jump from the realization that we do not completely understand all climate-related variables to the inference that we have no reliable knowledge at all.
Similarly, they give equal weight to the 97 percent of climate scientists who believe in human-caused global warming and the 3 percent who do not, (even though most of the latter are paid by the fossil fuels industry.)

This same type of thinking can be seen among creationists.
They misinterpret any limitation or flux in evolutionary theory to mean that the validity of this body of research is fundamentally in doubt. For example, the biologist James Shapiro discovered a cellular mechanism of genomic change that Darwin did not know about. Shapiro views his research as adding to evolutionary theory, not upending it. Nonetheless, his discovery and others like it, refracted through the lens of dichotomous thinking, result in articles with titles like, “Scientists Confirm: Darwinism Is Broken” by Paul Nelson and David Klinghoffer of the Discovery Institute, which promotes the theory of “intelligent design.” Shapiro insists that his research provides no support for intelligent design, but proponents of this pseudoscience repeatedly cite his work as if it does.

For his part, Trump engages in dichotomous thinking about the possibility of a link between childhood vaccinations and autism. Despite exhaustive research and the consensus of all major medical organizations that no link exists, Trump has often cited a link between vaccines and autism and he advocates changing the standard vaccination protocol to protect against this nonexistent danger.

There is a vast gulf between perfect knowledge and total ignorance,

We live our lives in this gulf.
Informed decision-making in the real world will never be perfectly informed,
but responding to the inevitable uncertainties by ignoring the best available evidence is frankly, ultimately a form of self genocide. 

Believing things that have no basis in reality to be true is a form of self eradication.

This Post-Truth World is one in which public figures cherry pick from available data to make untrue claims sound true, thereby devaluing the very nature of truth. (Remember Stephen Colbert's running joke "truthiness?...that was the mere start of this sad journey into idiocy)

It’s a world in which oil companies use the same deceitful tactics to “disprove” global warming that the tobacco industry used to “disprove” the link between smoking and lung cancer. It’s a world in which anti-vaccine activists still cite studies that are very well known to be discredited, and 9/11 (or Benghazi) “truthers” or so-called “birthers” entirely discount all the evidence against their tinfoil hat theories because "the data is all lies anyway."

The Post-Truth World is why we need skepticism.
It’s why we need skeptics.

Part of it is a problem with rhetoric.
As philosophy has debated forever, the concept of truth is a slippery one, because scientists don’t deal in truth. They deal in hypothesis and evaluation, in theory and consensus.

Off the record, a climate scientists will tell you, 97.2% of the time, that humans are the cause of the very real climate change that is taking place on Earth.  Though on the record, they will only tell you that it is “very likely” the case, and that the data fit the hypothesis better than any other currently-proposed explanation.

But Ted Cruz will tell you that “the last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.” He is certain (also: wrong), but worse than that, he’s certain in public. And on the record.

Another part of it is a problem with authority.
The post truthers don’t view scientists as authorities anymore.
They don't respect  the views espoused by the experts, the scientists themselves.
When it comes to some of the most important issues of our time, many people are just as likely to believe a politician as a scientist about global warming being caused by humans (yes, 54% of Americans is a serious improvement, but that’s still only about half when the scientific consensus is 97%). Some people even believe celebrities over scientists.

Skepticism isn’t (as climate change deniers might have one believe) just going against the prevailing consensus. When Ted Cruz uses the word “skeptic” to describe his views on climate change, and then compares himself to Galileo for going against the mainstream views, he’s fundamentally misunderstanding what skepticism means.

Skepticism is withholding judgement until provided with a preponderance of evidence. It’s also changing one’s opinion when presented with verifiable data that contradict one’s views.
 It’s as much about agreeing with the consensus when the data supports it as disagreeing with it when the data does not.
Galileo had data that showed a geocentric universe to be false; Ted Cruz has only his own completely uninformed opinion.

Skepticism is the application of the scientific  method on one's worldview.
You can do it even if you’re not a scientist: I’m a  musician for crying out loud.
Skepticism just entails personal integrity,  a bit of research,
patience, and, especially, an understanding
 that experts know more about their field of study than you do.

The Post-Truth World treats all expertise as equal, and a skeptic knows that’s not the case.
Skepticism is frankly mankind's only hope of emerging from the post truth malaise.

“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”
― Robert G. Ingersoll