The always-thoughtful Richard Fernandez posted the following thread recently on Twitter:
The catastrophic loss of institutional trust has made it imperative for the establishment to roll out virtual reality, not through goggles and special chairs, but by manipulating the entire information environment so that we live inside a lie.
One way to detect that you are inside an info bubble is to watch for a sudden rise and fall of overhyped policies, like manipulated stocks. Two recent candidates are COVID boosterism and trans mania. Today the world depends on it, then tomorrow it’s let’s move on.
Now that Google has found a way to get AI to actually write the news, it’s possible to micro adjust the information environment around us in near real time to produce a very plausible fake world where everything beyond your immediate ken is curated.
Once we are all confined to 15 Minute Cities what can we really know what lies beyond our sight except through our networked devices? Already as I walk down the street I see more and more people heads down on their phones. That’s the world to them.
I was immediately reminded of this, from Daniel Dennett’s 1987 book Consciousness Explained:
When your eyes dart about in saccades, the muscular contractions that cause the eyeballs to rotate are ballistic actions: your fixation points are unguided missiles whose trajectories at lift-off determine where and when they will hit ground zero at a new target. For instance, if you are reading text on a computer screen, your eyes will leap along a few words with each saccade, farther and faster the better a reader you are. What would it be like if a magician, a sort of Cartesian evil demon on a modest scale, could change the world during the few milliseconds your eyes were darting to their next destination? Amazingly, a computer equipped with an automatic eye-tracker can detect and analyze the lift-off in the first few milliseconds of a saccade, calculate where ground zero will be, and, before the saccade is over, erase the word on the screen at ground zero and replace it with a different word of the same length. What do you see? Just the new word, and with no sense at all of anything having been changed. As you peruse the text on the screen, it seems to you for all the world as stable as if the words were carved in marble, but to another person reading the same text over your shoulder (and saccading to a different drummer) the screen is aquiver with changes.
The effect is overpowering. When I first encountered an eye-tracker experiment, and saw how oblivious subjects were (apparently) to the changes flickering on the screen, I asked if I could be a subject. I wanted to see for myself. I was seated at the apparatus, and my head was immobilized by having me bite on a “bite bar.” This makes the job easier for the eye-tracker, which bounces an unnoticeable beam of light off the lens of the subject’s eye, and analyzes the return to detect any motion of the eye. While I waited for the experimenters to turn on the apparatus, I read the text on the screen. I waited, and waited, eager for the trials to begin. I got impatient. “Why don’t you turn it on?” I asked. “It is on,” they replied.
Gurdjieff, somewhere (I can’t remember where), said that the more conscious people become, the more they inhabit a shared, objective reality. In a roomful of sleepers, by contrast, each person inhabits a separate, subjective dream-world. The job, then, is for anyone who might awaken for a moment to try to rouse those around him before he yields again to the seductive pull of sleep.
Who is easier to rule? The sleeping, or the awakened? Will it not be in the interest of power, as our technology advances, to use it to lull each of us into our own personally customized, AI-tailored dreamland? And when our little screens are soon made obsolete by neural implants promising us the illusion of power, who will say no?
10 Comments
“Reality” is becoming the Twilight Zone. Or, is it the other way around? idk?
Well there’s the rub Malcolm: we should say “no” when the day of neural transplant comes.
Not that I’m some courageous dissident, since in many ways I can be a terrible coward. I hope when such a pivotal moment arises though I’ll do the right thing.
It’s hard to say no. Just look at the shot. I said no and persuasion very quickly turned into coercion followed by ostracism and exclusion. I think it is important to tether yourself to something, that is tangibly real. In my case it is growing the food we eat and chopping the wood we burn and tend for heat. Again, as shown by the shot the vast majority of people just stumble along to get along.
This artificial reality sounds like the Blue Pill world comes to life.
Covid hysteria and the totalitarian response was an excellent test, and the majority of the populations of the West failed miserably.
I refused to comply with any of it, as did my immediate family, and we suffered the consequences directly.
We proved to ourselves what we are made of, and made new friends who will never buckle, but it was a real awakening to see just how much of the public will do literally anything the government tells them, no matter how counterfactual and insane.
My conclusion is that the bulk of the population, including most college educated people, enjoy being lied to and told what to do, no matter how much it hurts them.
A conspiracy so vast…
Who is easier to rule? The sleeping, or the awakened?
Wouldn’t that depend on the purpose of ruling?
If the rulers have as their goal prosperity, defense of the realm, governing lightly, then the shared reality would allow much self-government, as obviousness and argument could settle most disputes.
If the rulers have as their goal acquiring the most sex, money, and power, sleepers are easier to shear.
EG,
Good point. I think it’s safe to say, though, that at this point in the great cycle of civilizations, we are dealing with the latter type.
To follow on the theme: the next superpower:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiUPD-z9DTg
about 15 minutes.