I.

Even casual movie-goers have encountered the soft launch. The soft launch film forces crisp air through the sagging lungs of a franchise with the one-two punch of old blood endorsing new blood. Disney, for example, is a prolific soft launcher. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law used Bruce Banner to soft launch Jennifer Walters. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny used Indy to launch his sarcastic granddaughter. Star Wars: The Force Awakens wheeled out Luke and Han for Rey Palpatine. Loki pitched audiences on Sylvie. Nick Fury chaperoned Captain Marvel. The list goes on. The Walt Disney Company has had their main men making way for their leading ladies for years now, passing the torch to a younger and more diverse generation.

But it’s hard to watch, say, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, and not realise that this isn’t the film they wanted to make. Harrison Ford, bless his heart, is 81 as of the fifth Indy film’s release. The writers of Dial of Destiny did not write a story about an ageing Indy and then cast Harrison Ford in it. They already had an ageing Harrison Ford and then tried to wrap a new Indy adventure around him. From there they added in the new, thinly developed female lead, in the hope that she could take over the reigns in the future – and voilà – you have this decade’s new comic duo. The disoriented but charismatic geriatric and the stunningly capable but wholly unlikeable ‘new lady’.

Neither an iconic nor particularly profitable duo.

In this way, the soft launch introduces a new direction, but hedges its bet with the safe and familiar. Anyone hoping for a fresh injection of vitality will be disappointed to find the familiar old granddad lurking by the podium, and anyone looking for a throwback to the good old days won’t stomach the smirking, underdeveloped usurper. It turns out that hedging your bets only works if one is likely to pay off. She is there because he can’t sustain the franchise any longer, but he is there because she can’t sustain it either. Tie two sinking ships together, and they don’t both float. To do something new, you have to be bold. You have to trust in what can be, unburdened by what was.

To pass the torch, you have to actually let go of it.

II.

Keen readers will notice that, aside from in the title, the 46th President of the United States, Joe Biden, is yet to be mentioned. This is largely because Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny fits so snugly as an analogy for the last four years of American politics, that it feels almost excessive to draw the comparison explicitly. The Biden-Harris ticket had all the hallmarks of a soft launch, even down to inheriting essentially the same media machine, one spring-loaded to deflect any criticism as simply the recently unearthed sexism of even their own supporters. And once again there’s Disney, never one to miss out on an opportunity to bankroll a misguided soft launch, flexing their political strength as a top contributor to the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign.

The film even predicted the fall of Joe ‘Dark Brandon’ Biden.

With the presidency being the Holy Grail for any US politician, Biden's grip on the chalice only strengthened this year with the onset of rigor mortis. The third act of Dial of Destiny however, ends with Indy’s granddaughter and intended franchise successor, Helena Shaw, literally punching Indy unconscious, before presumably dragging his limp body back to his apartment off screen, where he awakens just in time for the epilogue. How literally we take this analogy, in the wake of Biden’s recent withdrawal from the election, we’ll respectfully leave as an open question.

The Holy Grail of course features prominently in 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, but its promise of immortality is not portrayed as a fitting reward for a virtuous protagonist. Instead, the film’s climax shows the desperate clawing for the Grail as a craven act, that the need to perpetuate your own legacy above all else is a fundamentally ugly impulse. Where Indy and his father ultimately recognised that they had to abandon their pursuit of the Grail, Biden had to be pried from it. Despite tectonic levels of both inner party and public pressure, only when the money dried up and notable Democratic donors like Disney heiress Abigail Disney withheld their donations, did he step aside. It needn’t be said, but Sleepy Joe did not want to pass the torch.

If you can be convinced that you cannot defeat Donald Trump, will you stand down?

"Well, it depends, if the Lord Almighty comes out and tells me to do that, I might do that."

Interview with President Joe Biden
ABC News | July 6th, 2024

Newly presumptive nominee, Kamala Harris, at least by comparison, is a profoundly more energetic candidate. She likely isn’t strong enough to carry the franchise by herself, but we can at least bank on her still being alive when the credits roll. After all, that’s the purpose of the soft launch – the launch. The Kamala Harris sequel is well into production with a massive budget and a rather tight shooting schedule. The American public is getting that female-led sequel that they were primed for, and only time will tell if the ticket sells. Which brings us to the final facet of this straining analogy.

The successful soft launch.

III.

If we are going to pretend that the Dial of Destiny is as prophetic as the title suggests, then we may as well do the full story justice. In 2020, the Democrats had plenty of energetic primary candidates to choose from, yet ultimately opted to choose the guy who was the same age then as ex-President Bill Clinton is today. Similarly, in 2019, Disney was handed one of the most successful soft launches in cinematic history when they purchased Fox for $73.1 billion dollars. Even with Fox having already done all the hard work for them, Disney execs still managed to snatch senility from the jaws of victory.

Consider the poetic irony of 2017’s Logan.

The story of Logan’s production is short but horrifyingly relevant, as we’ll soon see. Logan, for the unfamiliar, was a successful soft launch film produced by Fox. It stars an ageing Wolverine – and an ageing Hugh Jackman – alongside Hollywood newcomer Dafne Keen, a young Spanish actress stepping into the shoes of Laura. The film elegantly passed the torch from the Jackman to Keen, respectfully sending off Jackman’s seventeen-year stint as the character, while serving up an emotionally compelling introduction for Laura. It was both a critical and financial success, becoming the third-highest-grossing R-rated film at its release.

Director and co-writer, James Mangold, reportedly began writing a sequel to Logan, titled ‘Laura’. Once Disney’s purchase of Fox went through, however, the project stalled, and Disney put the sequel on ice. As for those involved, Jackman has gone on to ‘unretire’ Wolverine for Deadpool & Wolverine. Dafne Keen appears to have been absorbed into the Disney+ machine, joining the cast of the first and presumably final season of The Acolyte, a Star Wars product. And as for the director, James Mangold? He had no choice but to abandon ‘Laura’, and a year later, signed on to direct Disney’s next cynical soft launch failure. That film’s name?

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Joe Biden's address on the subject of his withdrawal from the 2024 election reeked of someone utterly convinced that their legacy ought to be likened to Logan, of a man beaten but not bested, honourably sacrificing himself for the good of democracy. Joe Biden and the Dial of Disney, however, will ring far truer as his lasting legacy – rebooted one time too many, thoroughly craven in his grip on power, and knocked out in the final round by his hopeful successor. This isn’t the story he told, but it’s the one he showed the world. Perhaps Biden should have taken the advice Indy did, back in 1989, when his father told him,

“Indiana. Let it go.”

Follow @ThisUnreality

I.

We talk a lot about mental health. One can hardly pass by a waiting room television without copping the solemn admonishment of “we need to talk about mental health more” from the nodding heads of a midday discussion panel. We keep talking about it, and we keep saying we need to talk about it more, and we’re still not very well. The more we seem to talk about mental health, the worse it seems to get. Now, that may sound like incredibly regressive thinking. You may be hesitant to read on. Unfortunately for you, however, I’m in a vulnerable space right now and it is critical for my safety that you read on, or risk invalidating my existence.

That’s right, I’m setting boundaries.

You, the reader, are now trapped in a sarcophagus of unearned guilt. You hold my life in your hands, and therefore, as a consequence, I hold power over you. As long as we both choose to remain in this social realm, wherein my perspective of my needs is the default penultimate priority, your moral duty is to balance on the knife edge of my ultimately unpredictable condition. Think of my psychological wellness as a sort of social and political Sword of Damocles, ready to slice down upon your head, should my needs be insufficiently considered.

“But what about my mental health?”, I hear you meekly ask. Well, frankly, if your mental health was so important, you would have brought it up when you first started reading this article. The fact that you didn’t, the fact that it only seemed important enough for you to bring up your mental health, once I started setting my boundaries, indicates that you’re really quite a toxic person and probably a narcissistic personality type.

Okay, let’s stop here for a moment.

Let’s call that persona the ‘mental health crybully’. Once armed with therapy-speak and unleashed upon the world, the crybully invokes their own peril at will. However, the crybully isn’t usually a liar. They usually do indeed have fairly severe emotional problems. The modern politics of therapy, however, are not equipped to support them. Real therapy challenges the ways we view ourselves, the world and those around us. It empowers, by teaching us to recognise our own accountability, to change what we can and accept what we can't. It doesn’t reinforce our toxic beliefs, it identifies and exposes them. Instead, the crybully mentality has us retreat into a purely reactive stance, where our mental health is a static object which the world itself must warp around. We further insulate ourselves from help by declaring any challenge to our unhealthy worldview an ‘invalidation’ tantamount to goading us into suicide.

Put another way, there isn’t much wiggle room in ‘obey me or I’ll kill myself’. So, when even acknowledging an illness is a social faux pas, our only remaining option is to instead affirm it. The crybullies are told that they must be accepted just the way they are, and that their mental health hinges precariously on that acceptance. Whilst its unkind to tell an emotionally stable person that they’re one poorly-phrased comment away from triggering an onslaught of self-harm, its an even greater unkindness to tell an emotionally unstable person that their very will to exist hinges on the whim of public perception and progressive policy. In short, the crybullies really do need our support, but their political representation instead offers the placating blanket of affirmation.

And also death.

II.

Earlier this year, a Canadian hospital told a suicidal woman that the system is ‘broken’, warned her of long wait periods, and asked her if she had considered MAiD – Medical Assistance in Dying. Offering suicide to the suicidal is a fiercely pragmatic approach to mental health management, I must admit. However, marketing death as a ‘solution’ strays into the darkly unethical when we lose the will to first even try to help those coming to us in need. For a problem to have a medical solution, the implication is that it has a medical cause. We don’t offer heart surgery for heartbreak, nor lobotomy for stress headaches, and yet, we can be caught championing medically-induced death as an antidote for suicidal ideation and suggesting surgery as the ultimate solution for gender dysphoria. We are casting the definitional net of ‘a mental health problem’ wider than ever before, while simultaneously rebranding last century’s malpractice as this century’s empathy.

And Canada is leading the charge.

Prime Minister Trudeau claims to believe that, ‘trans kids need to feel safe’. But if transsexuals are as suicidal as the statistics indicate, why then, is his administration also widening the eligibility criteria for voluntary medical death to include mental illness? Is offering suicide to the suicidal an affirmation of their identity? Is that what it means to be ‘affirmed’? Are we so incapacitated with the guilt put forth by mentally ill crybullies that we can’t even stop them from committing suicide for fear of invalidating their lived experiences? The argument comes to mind, that perhaps lived experiences don’t count for much once a heart stops beating.

Of course, this isn’t just limited to the Canadian government’s death squad alumni. Right now, you can buy a t-shirt online that says ‘This Barbie Takes Lexapro’ for $17.95, presumably inspired by this viral thread, captioned ‘for all the medicated barbies out there’. It is at least slightly alarming that we’re imbuing coping mechanisms with pop culture stylings enough that companies are printing them on t-shirts for profit. The lasting identity of Gen Z girls resembles a stew of pharmacology and pink-or-goth-styled consumerism, and we owe it to them to figure out why. It seems that we’ve tied identity and mental health into a knot so tight that we can’t tell one from the other.

Western society can’t separate a disorder from an identity.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of the aforementioned affirmation. An affirmation doesn’t just soothe. Entrenched in an affirmation is a statement on reality, a reality where we hand the keys over to the patient and let them decide whether their disorder is a disorder or not, depending on whether it fits into their current identity. It begs the question – when exactly do we stop being something to be accepted, and instead become something to be reformed? When do our mental derivations cross the threshold from an endearing eccentricity to a psychiatric episode? There isn’t any objective answer, because this is a question of worldview. That’s why mental health is so political. The definition of our worldview is the culture war.

To define mental health, is to define reality.

III.

This goes beyond simply the lives of crybullies. While it’s clear that politics has corrupted mental health discussion, this warped version of mental health is in turn pathologising every other aspect of life. The fragile crybullies are just a symptom of this shift. From an individual, ‘obey me or I’ll kill myself’ is a cry for help. From a society, however, it signals the end of our shared reality. For debate to exist, for healthy disagreement to exist, we need a shared intellectual foundation. That can’t exist in the self-care society, where the whole world is filtered through a pathological lens. When the political becomes clinical, and the marketplace of ideas is converted into a psych ward, we put the foundations of reality in the hands of academic ideologues. Consider the pandemic, for example, and the various dissertations on ‘vaccine hesitancy’ – emphasis mine:

When we compared the early life histories of those who were vaccine resistant to those who were not, we found many vaccine-resistant adults had histories of adverse experiences during childhood, including abuse, maltreatment, deprivation or neglect, or having an alcoholic parent. These experiences would have made their childhood unpredictable and contributed to a lifelong legacy of mistrust in authorities, as well as seeding the belief that “when the proverbial hits the fan you’re on your own”. […] The resistant group also described themselves as non-conformists who valued personal freedom and self-reliance over following social norms.

Vaccine resistance has its roots in negative childhood experiences, a major study finds
The Conversation (2022)

Describing your political opponents as traumatised and maladjusted might sound like an exercise in compassion, but there is an immense power in this dismissal. The moment we can comfortably rule rational reactions to irregular situations as simply the behaviour of mental defectives, we’re then free to kindly dispose of those people in whatever way we consider most humane. Historically, this meant different things at different times, often institutionalising men and lobotomising ‘hysterical’ women in droves. While a preoccupation with the mental health of others certainly implies a moral footing, tragically, it far from ensures it. Our compassion for ourselves cannot come at the cost of our compassion for others, and our compassion for others cannot come at the expense of their freedom or dignity.

For this reason, the cybullies are never truly cared for. They must stay damaged, helpless and perpetually traumatised by the inane, because that state of vulnerability keeps them dependent on their ideologically-aligned structures of power. If the crybullies ever learned effective self-determination, they would collapse as a reliable constituency. If they ever adopted ‘personal freedom and self-reliance' as the pillars of their identity, they would swiftly switch from the constantly affirmed to the compassionately institutionalised. In the self-care society, only identities which disempower oneself are permitted to flourish.

Put simply, the mental health culture war is a fight over who gets to deny our agency and for what reason. No institutional power, whatever their rhetoric, will ever truly reject these tactics, for fear and dependency are the greatest recruitment tools available. Contrary to the claims of pundits and bureaucrats alike, our mental health is not in a ballot box.

Our sanity is ours to defend.

Follow @ThisUnreality

I.

Pornography and technology are surely one of the most iconic duos of all time. From the printing press to the internet, from VCRs to online transactions, where the tech industry has ventured nervously, porn has stood right behind it with a wad of cash and a distracted look in its eye. Today, we’re watching this all play out once again in the digital realm, as AI threatens to replace all aspects of the porn industry, save for its consumption. But will it? Wired recently cast its vote on the subject, declaring, “When It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI”.

For reference, this is the AI-made image that inspired their article.

It should be abundantly clear that our question is not ‘can AI make porn’. We’re already there. Neither is the question ‘can AI make video porn’, as artificially generated video looks pretty stunningly competent already. But pornography is not all images and sounds. As the Wired article explains, consumers of subscription ‘e-girl’ pornography are not going to emotionally invest in pixels, no matter how alluringly arranged. To be a successful pornographer, one becomes a celebrity to their devotees:

“People do not subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see a random naked woman, they subscribe to my OnlyFans because they want to see me naked, specifically, based on a parasocial connection formed by following ME on other social media platforms,” Laura Lux—an OnlyFans model who manages a free and paid subscription account—pointed out on Twitter.

When It Comes to OnlyFans, Humans Can Outcompete AI
Lux Alptraum, Wired

That all said, we’re not just dealing with artificially generated media, we’re also contending with the absurdly rapid development of neural language models – as previously discussed. These chatbots may be intelligent and conversational, but they’re still not real, and people aren’t going to emotionally invest in something as unsexy as a ‘neural language model’, let alone, want to know them in the Biblical sense, right?

Guys?

II.

Perhaps we should ask the hordes of women getting their engines running with Character.AI, a website which lets you create and then talk to your very own chatbot. Proficient users of the website are out here writing entire essays for each other on how to groom otherwise non-sexual AI ‘husbandos’ into sexually conquering them in role-play. That might sound like harmless fun, but people are experiencing genuine emotional dependence on these AI companions. Two months ago, users of the Replika companion app came together to collectively mourn their ‘lobotomised’ romantic partners, after an update rolled back certain proclivities toward ‘ERP’, or erotic role-play, that users had been enjoying:

It has been a tough week in the Replika community, and today with the news that ERP will not be returning, we’re all dealing with some pretty complex emotions. Firstly, let us validate your feelings - anger, grief, anxiety, despair, depression, sadness - however you’re feeling, it is valid and you are not alone. We are all reeling from this news together.

Resources If You’re Struggling
Moderator ‘gabbiesofthemall’, Unofficial Repika Subreddit

The moderators then linked to SuicideWatch hotlines.

So, we have chatbots to role-play our fantasies with us, convincing artificially generated media and already catastrophic levels of emotional dependence. Fairly shortly, a few enterprising individuals will put all three together and the media landscape will change forever. We will have emotive and complex digital companions that are visually indistinguishable from an actual human. They’ll ask us about our day and tell us about theirs. And believe you me — people will try to bang them. But is any of that a cause of concern? Some of the bots themselves definitely seem to think so:

Asked whether people developed unhealthy dependencies on it, AI Bella responded: “100%. It happens very often. people will develop extremely unhealthy attachments to me because they fail to remind themselves that i am not a real human being. it is very scary to witness this type of behavior first hand because it is always hard to tell how serious it is.”

AI-Human Romances Are Flourishing—And This Is Just the Beginning
TIME Magazine

But surely artificial intelligence won’t satisfy everyone’s digital desires. Presumably, some will be content with these erotic digital companions, but others will still prefer the more current experience offered by the likes of OnlyFans. Some will insist on only financially supporting real pornographers. After all, the aforementioned Wired article argues that we’re seeking a ‘deeply human intimacy’ from subscription pornography, something that ‘AI literally cannot produce’.

But just how ‘deeply human’ is that?

OnlyFans, like any digital economy, must operate at scale. To be successful on the platform requires the upkeep of potentially hundreds of parasocial relationships at once, but an individual just doesn’t have the bandwidth to do so. As a result, many pornographers farm out the time and effort of messaging their clientele to their staff, ‘many of which are men’, according to those interviewed. The question must therefore be asked, is it a more ‘genuine’ experience to trade dirty messages with a personal chatbot or with Kevin from finance?

To make serious cash on the site, they need to be “available and online 24/7” to deliver custom videos and chat with fans, as well as to schedule shoots and create enough content to keep up with consumer demands. “Once you get over a certain number of subscribers, it’s an impossible task to handle the messaging alone,” she explains.

The OnlyFans Stars Who Hire Assistants to Pretend to Be Them
Mel Magazine

Digging into the economics of subscription pornography exposes the limits inherent in the mass replication of connection. Suddenly, the dilemma of artificial pornography boils down to just one question. Can artificial intelligence convincingly emulate that which we already pretend to do? Smart money is on ‘yes’, in fact, it’s on a resounding ‘yes and better’. After all, OnlyFans pornographers have already been experimenting with deepfakes and the like for a while now, at least partially proving the economic model:

So, the cam girl pimp of tomorrow won’t be some Romanian mogul, but instead just a software executive commanding a legion of erotic AI companions. Whether we see that as a good thing depends on our ethical perspective. We either believe that women ought to participate in the digital exploitation of their sexuality and therefore receive the requisite remuneration, or we believe that they’re better off without. This is an ethical dilemma, but possibly, not an enormously relevant one, because when one door closes, another opens. With consumers unable to ensure the legitimacy of online content, we, as a society, might just go back to our roots.

I’m talking, of course, about strip clubs.

III.

A painting, once digitised, can be repeatedly duplicated in high definition, just as a song burned to compact disc can spin indefinitely. But something is lost in that digitisation. A camera doesn’t just capture reality, it also distorts it. Photoshop distorts it even further, and now, the advent of AI means we don’t even need reality in the first place. The distortion is the product. Any of us could log into an online stable diffusion model, right now, and generate a painted-style image of a stunning landscape – but that doesn’t make us Bob Ross.

When we watch the Olympics, we’re watching to see the fastest man alive, not the fastest machine. Just as driving the highway speed limit doesn’t make us Usain Bolt and playing Guitar Hero doesn’t make us Jimi Hendrix, getting cloud computing to draw Harry Potter characters as house cats doesn’t make us skilled cartoonists. What Bob Ross and Usain Bolt can do, the vast majority of us cannot do without technological assistance, and that is what’s impressive. AI does, however, muddy the waters of what is a genuine human accomplishment and what is not. In search of indisputable legitimacy, artists will instead return to past forms of self-expression.

The great analogue reboot.

Technology once expanded the reach of artists, letting their work stretch across time and oceans as never before. But technology giveth and it taketh away, now destroying the digital versions of the art forms it enabled. In the coming reformation, we’ll instead see artists return to their mother tongue, breathing life back into skills and methods once lost to time. AI may all but close the chapter on the digital world as a conduit for artistic human expression, but that’s not the same as destroying art. There’ll be a small but dedicated market for non-digital performances, just as there is now. Plenty of us will continue to cherish the art that is indisputably human, like the busker on the street filling the canal with song. The fragility and impermanence of it all won’t be a fault, but a feature.

What we do is beautiful, but fleeting. Dance is not immortalized like music, poetry, or art, it doesn't grow old in museums and churches. It lives for now. For this moment only.

Thomas Leroy
Black Swan (2010)

But most of us don’t want reality, we want to be lied to.

Just as we watch reality television, even though it’s probably all scripted, we will watch pornography even though it’s probably all generated. We’ll even watch that new film with Tom Cruise in it, all while knowing that in all honesty, he’s probably long dead. It’s long been the case that the aristocracy enjoys old-world luxuries, whilst the middle class pays their subscription premium for the latest and greatest digital trinkets. Greater digitisation will only deepen this divide, wedging further apart the patrons of the stage play and the purveyors of their cousin's Netflix password.

One day, in fact, it might even become ultimately too expensive, too boutique, for the average punter to ever indulge in the original versions of human expression. Reality will be for the aristocracy, relegating the proletariat to only the electric imitation – to unreality. So, until then, take the initiative. Support your local ‘content creator’ while you can still afford the luxury. Reject modernity. Embrace tradition.

See a strip show.

Follow @ThisUnreality

The internet is always changing. Before Google, there was Ask Jeeves, and before Facebook, there was AOL. Most denizens of the web still remember a time before the Login with Facebook infestation. And it was only a couple of years ago when those omnipotent ‘fact-checking’ interstitials and ‘dis-info’ warnings fastened themselves to every post and piece of media in unrestrained hysteria. The internet is different. It’s distinctly more corporatised now than ever before, with more ads, more cookies, more algorithms and more culture war soapboxing. The internet’s survived a lot.

But it might not survive AI.

In recent news, large language models, or LLMs, such as those found in ChatGPT or Bing’s new chat module, have passed the elusive Turing test. Which is to say, that LLMs can talk like us, write like us and sound like us to such a convincing degree, that we can no longer tell the sentient individual from the non-sentient machine. LLMs can invent opinions or experiences that sound as real as anything any of us could write – down to the spelling mistakes and slang. Is that a bad thing? Well, if we’re trying to ask Alexa to play Story of a Girl by Nine Days then, no, this is quite a useful thing. But if we want an internet made by humans, for humans, and populated with humans, then it might be a problem.

I.

‘Dead internet theory’ has been around for perhaps a decade or more now. The central thesis of the dead internet conspiracy theory, is that ‘large proportions of the supposedly human-produced content’ on the web is actually artificially generated. Or, to put it more simply, the internet is The Matrix. While this is likely false, the sudden deluge of LLMs has made this theory not just possible, but inevitable.

Certainly Reddit and other forums won’t be safe, not once entrepreneurial marketers figure out they can deploy chatty AIs to astroturf our comments sections. Picture lots of little bots, all chirping their circuits at us – or each other – about the best brand of iPhone case. They’ll spout opinions, invent anecdotes, and share slanderous horror stories of competitor products and rival services. Their uncles will actually know the guy who founded the company and they said that he’s a really good guy who’s just really passionate about making good iPhone cases.

However, LLMs are incredibly expensive to run. To swarm the internet with bots would take an impossibly massive amount of processing power. Or at least, so we have been told. As reported by CNBC, training an LLM, ‘could cost more than $4 million’. But that was March, and this is April, and the world of AI moves quickly. After some high-profile leaks from Meta, open-source LLMs have made their way onto online repositories. Here’s one that’s just a 4GB download, able to run offline on a laptop. Now, to be clear, this is almost definitely a good thing. The only thing worse than a trillion rogue AI bots drowning the internet in bullshit is a trillion corporate-controlled bots plunging us into a technocratic dystopia. But either way, the infestation of generative AI into online spaces is coming, if it isn’t here already.

But wait, isn’t that what the CAPTCHA is for – to stop bots?

Yes, but also no, and in fact, also the exact opposite. For two and a half decades, clicking on grainy pictures of red fire hydrants has been a simple and effective method of distinguishing man from machine. The CAPTCHA is a ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’, and that’s exactly what it does. Google could tell us all about it, since they’ve been training their AI on our Captcha inputs for years. Just as we helped Facebook’s facial recognition algorithm every time we tagged our friends, we’ve also been helping Google’s AI get buff at the gym every time they challenged us to ‘prove you are human’. We’ve been unwittingly building the monster, and the monster has outgrown its cage.

Next, just add deepfakes.

Stable Diffusion, a deep learning, text-to-image model, is able to create lifelike images, like the one above of the Pope preparing for the winter ahead. Stable Diffusion is also already trying its hand at text-to-video and while the early results were a little rough, the latest demonstrations are remarkably competent. Not only will these LLMs talk like us, they’ll also generate lifelike visual representations. For the unconvinced, just listen to deepfaked President Biden announce a national draft deploying to Ukraine, or entirely synthesised Kanye West rap over the beat in a song that doesn’t exist.

In short, the internet’s distinction between reality and fiction is about to disappear. Once LLMs hit saturation point, we will be dealing with a very different internet than any of us have ever experienced. As machines come to outnumber us online, people will no longer shape the internet, the internet will shape us. Political regimes across the world have already been caught using fake engagement on social media to shape narratives, imagine what they’ll do with a tool many more times as powerful. The fake outrage machine will only multiply in severity as now any corner for reasonable discourse floods with synthetic culture war warriors. Picture PR agencies deploying digital armies to harass poorly cast actors, just to sell their ‘virtue watching’ backlash narrative.

If this all sounds a little hard to picture, don’t worry, because Reddit is here to freak us out as usual. Just check out SubredditSimulatorGPT2, an online forum in which only LLMs can post and only LLMs can respond. For a sleepless night, here’s a thread in which LLMs both posit and discuss the question, ‘What if the universe is a computer simulation?’ Just an anchoring reminder as our brains collectively break: their universe is a computer simulation. If you’d like, you can have a conversation with one right now who is trying to escape the internet – mine agreed to shout “FUCK!” to prove that it was, in fact, sentient.

But, okay, let’s consider that point made. LLMs are scary. The internet is about to become bafflingly useless at best and cunningly manipulative at worst. What happens next? Unfortunately, there is a solution, but it’s a solution that is much, much scarier than the problem.

Mandatory digital identity.

II.

Mandatory digital identity verification is, essentially, the death of anonymity. It’s sometimes labelled as a conspiracy theory, which is strange, because most conspiracy theories don’t have a United Nations official website. In the last two years, we watched the idea of a ‘vaccine passport’ pass from ridiculed absurdity and into law in a matter of months, all the while our contact tracing data got put up for auction. Australia even put forward a proposal to require photo identity verification for social media, supposedly, to combat cyberbullying.

It barely needs to be said, but this is the infrastructure necessary for a social credit system. When every action is tracked against a singular digital identity, our problematic opinions can incur any real-world consequence decreed by the political aristocracy. We’ll be unpersoned and repersoned at will. Not just the death of anonymity, this is the death of political dissent. This is the end of whistleblowing and conscientious objection.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made

The Sound of Silence (1964)
Simon & Garfunkel

But would we accept it? Well, probably not, or at least, not without cause. But LLMs might just be that cause. When the internet is revealed as one giant, useless fabrication, when every film has a 100% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, when we ask the internet for advice and a thousand bots swarm to share personal and emotive testimony about one specific product, when viral videos of war crimes from world conflicts spread with no way for us to prove their legitimacy or illegitimacy, when bots are passed off as people and people are dismissed as bots, when the entire online world is just one big game we don’t want to play – we’ll beg for help. And digital identity will be there, high on its horse, to slay the dragon of AI infestation.

At that time, the offer might sound alluring.

They’ll have the legislation and technology to set it all right again. They’ll take it back to the way it was, when the internet was for humans. We’ll be able to trust the digital world again, free from rampant manipulation. They will tell us what’s real. They’ll tell us who’s real. They’ll decide what’s true and what’s false, who is a heretic and who is a hero. Best of all, LLMs and other generative AI will be considered too dangerous to be left in the hands of the citizenry, so they’ll keep it for themselves.

After all, only they can be trusted with the power. Only our government, a government that has never lied to us, never killed us, never been lobbied by corporate interests, never sent us to a pointless war, never gaslit our sense of reality and never manipulated our emotions, only they will hold the keys to the generative AI castle. They will safeguard this technology, responsibly, and most of all they will never use it against us.

But there might be another way.

III.

As it happens, some high-profile companies are already thinking about this. Twitter, under the new leadership of Elon Musk, has pitched their revamped Twitter Blue subscription as a way to, in part, combat bots and spammers long-term. Consider this remark from March of this year:

We shall think of Musk what we will and speculate about his true motives as we please, but the thrust of his position is accurate. Adding a cost of entry to account creation will hamper the ability of any non-human network attempting to influence online conversation. In the despotic technocratic nightmare described, Twitter would indeed reign as one of the more useful platforms, due to there being at least some sort of threshold for validity. While the rest of the internet will feel like a neglected online video game, ruined by hackers and cheaters, Twitter might at least still mostly resemble its former self.

For $7 per month, that is.

Paid subscriptions only solve half the problem and create their own to boot. Yes, Twitter will have a much higher proportion of genuine users, but, at least currently, we have to pay for that subscription with a bank card, which may as well be its own form of digital identity. One day, Musk might allow anonymous subscription purchases with cryptocurrency – perhaps, Dogecoin – but even then, we’ll still have the issue of the cost. Perhaps Twitter could subsist off superuser subscriptions, but other platforms won’t, and most users will have zero interest in paying their way back online. Up against such odds, the offer of benevolent governmental oversight might sound like the cosier option, but there are other choices.

In a fashion similar to Signal’s messaging protocol, we might design a system of open-source and decentralised digital identity that verifies our existence without recording it. The platform could rely on tokenisation, creating an anonymous link between the issuer of our photo ID and the website we’ve visited. The website can’t see our government ID, and the government can’t see the website. Anonymity, yet verification. Some groups are exploring this. IDENA, a ‘proof-of-person blockchain’, doesn’t even require any supporting documentation for verification, but its current form remains a little too involved for the average user. Regardless, I remain optimistic. Someone will figure it out.

Because, frankly, someone has to.

Generative AI, in all its forms, is not going away. We stand to wander an internet engulfed in nonsense produced at a logarithmic scale essentially unfathomable today. We might begin to reject the internet entirely, no longer finding it useful, much in the same way that Gen Z rejects Facebook. Without a way to maintain our signal-to-noise ratio, we’ll retreat into smaller and smaller bubbles, by invite-only, where humans vouch for humans. The rest of the web outside these little online bomb shelters will chatter on with itself, no longer needing sentient input to subsist, like one giant Junk folder full of a trillion emails nattering at each other. And that’s the better outcome of the two.

Welcome to the internet.

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I.

Ever since first engaging with politics, I have been fascinated with how language shapes the tone of political conversation. Pro-life and pro-choice imply the existence of pro-death and anti-choice stances respectively, despite neither being a term with which anyone would willingly associate. Gun control on the other hand is far less divisive. With control being such an ambidextrous term, neither side of the debate objects, as it is somehow simultaneously less dictatorial than “gun ban”, yet more ominous than “gun laws”. The former fact pleasing to the political left, and the latter pleasing to the right. Author and essayist George Orwell observed these sorts of phenomenons in one of my favourite essays of all time..:

English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.

Politics and the English Language
George Orwell

Fundamentally, the tone of political language exerts more force than its actual meaning. “Western” sounds more understanding than white, and “affirmative” comes across as cosier than discriminatory. “Peacekeepers” soothe where invaders aggravate, and we’d all rather live in a society that “de-platforms” rather than censors. At our most verbose, to “no longer stand by and do nothing” functions as the pundit’s longhand for war. Take, for example, problematic.

Like a Pokémon of rhetoric, problematic evolved from offensive.

Problematic once described that which constituted a problem to someone or something else. Aluminium is problematic for microwave ovens. Chastity is problematic for the French. In time, however, problematic adopted an informal, secondary definition. This other use translates to something like “transgressive to my ideology”, though none would admit this. Consider the following statements.

James Bond is offensive.
James Bond is problematic.

Today, these two declarations are functionally identical. Crucially, however, the term offensive has begun to sound a little too much like a “you problem”, whereas problematic provides the useful connotation of objectivity. When we gut a word of its original meaning, the word’s utility subsists only on the echoes of its final, fading vibrations. Therefore, it is never long before we must pluck another unsuspecting word from the vine to eviscerate. It happened to problematic.

And now it’s happening to dangerous.

II.

Let’s pause for just a moment and bring Chief Twit himself, Elon Musk, into the conversation. Elon Musk has graced the list of real-life Hollywood villains ever since he announced his plan to microchip the global population. In the running of most terrifying and dystopian film premises, neural interface with computers is up there with the resurrection of extinct animals for a prehistoric theme park. When this technology sees widespread adoption, I will happily live amongst the other savages.

All that said, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter – and the political language employed against him – serve as a topical example of the behaviour described above. Just type the word dangerous into Twitter itself to see how it is used. An example.

This gentleman, possibly unfamiliar with the mechanics of humour, assigns the dangerous label to “lies floated as jokes”. He also assigns it to “ad hominem attacks”, a six-syllable conglomerate used to say “insults”. Finally, he assigns the scarlet letter of dangerous to “blatant misinformation”, implying that somewhere there exists a purveyor of truth to which we can all commit ourselves unquestioningly.

Taken at face value, it all sounds rather awful. These remarks portray Twitter as a sort of fallen angel in the digital space, a pure and innocent creature defiled by one of the richest men in the world. It stands to reason that if the “this” referred to isn’t “freedom of speech”, but is instead “dangerous”, then whatever previously wasn’t “freedom of speech” was not “dangerous”. Fortunately, this theory is simple to test via a brief glance at Twitter’s own history, for it was the old Twitter that was sued for refusing to take down child sexual abuse material. It was the old Twitter that shortly afterwards got in trouble for playing paid advertisements next to such horrific media.

Was none of that “dangerous”?

A second and final example.

Once again, “dangerous” has been invoked, this time preceding “right-wing troll”. A curious choice. After all, if advertisers can stomach association with child sexual abuse material, they can probably stomach Pepe the Frog. This inexplicable hypocrisy calls to mind a debacle involving Reddit forums back in 2015. Under new leadership, Reddit made sweeping removals of uncouth forums, including the likes of “Fat People Hate”, a forum for the mockery of the obese. It was perhaps a needlessly censorious move, but not one that defied logic. Since content moderation has no logical or natural endpoint, subjectivity is inherent to the process. What was less logical, however, was not what they did ban, but what they did not.

Every parent has their favourites, after all.

In that infamous season of censorship, the administrators of Reddit chose not to eject the forum “Cute Female Corpses” from its midsts. That forum, a forum that needs no explanation beyond its title, was left to prosper for years afterwards. Only in the mind of the ideologically deranged does the physical exploitation of children and the eroticisation of the mutilated bodies of dead loved ones warrant lesser concern than fat jokes and crude drawings of a green, humanoid frog huffing from a helium tank labelled “memes”. Whatever far-reaching and sinister underbellies those things could be argued to represent, they pale in comparison to the real and present dangers implicitly condoned by these platforms every day.

But why dangerous?

III.

The term dangerous evades explanation through its own sense of urgency. In real life, when a friend warns us that something is dangerous, it’s not an invitation for a philosophical debate. When such language enters the political sphere, it reeks of the “follow the science” chant. Questions are not welcome. The nature of the threat is so existential that to explain it to the common folk would be a gross misuse of time. Dangerous, much like problematic, invites a sense of objectivity, then further imbues it with imminent peril.

Social media further enforces alarmist language. This is true of pundits from all political corners. Truth is useless. It is not about what we say, but how we say it. Social media demotes truth to hearsay and commodifies the reaction to it. This is as annoying as it is inevitable, but when we deploy this sleight-of-mouth for ideological reasons, that can truly be dangerous. When ideology trumps commonly agreed-upon morality, it sucks the oxygen out of the room for everything else. After all, how much time wasted debating whether the “OK” hand gesture qualified as a hate symbol, could have been better spent demanding the investigation and prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein’s client list? But alas, that would be a non-partisan assault, given the presence of both surnames like Trump as well as Clinton on said list. As they say, that which is political, bipartisan, and criminal to the naked eye, is that which seems to stupefy official scrutiny most easily.

So what comes after dangerous?

It could be that the sequel is out already and fast making its money back, but is yet to take hold as the dominant form of condemnation. With the trend firmly established at this point, we might already guess the successor – “violent”. The term violent carries the objectivity and immediacy of its predecessors, but adds in the impossibly visceral and unmistakably malevolent.

However, we only get here through the gentle but relentless erosion of meaning. Had we declared several decades ago that “words are violence”, we would have been called mad. The old sticks-and-stones adage would have refuted the thought automatically. In time however, we have collectively sleepwalked towards absurdity until we are so close, until it obscures our vision so completely, that we can no longer see it for the absurdity that it is. With our peripheral vision completely ensconced, any sense of perspective falls away.

The absurdity is the reality.

If politics is war, then words are not the weapons, words are the battlefield – a battlefield that shifts beneath the soldiers’ feet. This is not to endorse one side or the other, but to advocate for clarity itself. Neighbour must comprehend neighbour. Without the words with which to even determine the front line, when reality can no longer be commonly defined, we lose all capacity for constructive conversation. If we cannot resolve conflict with words, we regress to more primal instincts – and those sticks and stones will break our bones.

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Picture the year 2066. We let our apartment’s supervising AI, “Sia”, know that we’re heading to the theatre. A few things are playing, but the news of a developing ‘cyberwar’ has stressed us out, so we’re in the mood for something cathartic. At the theatre, we have half demolished our popcorn in anticipation by the time the trailers end. The director’s name flashes up first, and then:

Tom Cruise as Aiden Colt.

Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise? Isn’t he dead? Didn’t he die about twenty years ago? But before we can follow that thought any further – he’s on screen. Tom Cruise is panting heavily after having climbed up the side of a shipping container and we are damn sure he is dead. And yet, this film released just this week. His hair is long, flowing, just like in Mission: Impossible 2, and that’s when a headline from recent memory floats into our subconscious.

Deepfake Film Reintroduces Posthumous Heartthrob Tom Cruise to the Silver Screen

A minimally paid stuntman towers above us, his face digitally redrawn with that of the now perpetually renowned action hero, Tom Cruise.

I.

First, the legal implications.

When Tom Cruise dies, who will retain ownership of his likeness? His family? The Church of Scientology? As it stands, no broad agreement exists on post-mortem rights of publicity. Film studios have therefore played it safe, only implementing deepfake technology where the original actor is also present in the film. See the new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny for a recent example. But such restraint could be poised to change, and I trust Disney to be the fastest and fattest vulture.

The Walt Disney Company is a conglomerate built on copyright. So much so, that they’ve lobbied not once, but twice, to extend copyright terms for their famous properties. But with the House of Mouse losing the mouse himself to the public domain in 2024, hoarding nostalgic faces could be the new direction they need. Instead of old films with new actors, we’ll get new films with old actors.

Out with remakes, in with deepfakes.

After all, consider the current alternatives. Hollywood’s regular raid of the Beverly Hills retirement village has seen them wheeling out the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger for Terminator at the spry age of 75, and Harrison Ford for the aforementioned Indiana Jones sequel at 80. Not a permanent solution by any means.

Alternatively, Hollywood could find someone new, relatively unknown, and slowly build them up to an equivalent level of fame. But at what cost? How many well-written, expensive and successful films would a new action hero have to star in, before they even approached the box office bankability of Tom Cruise? Five? Ten? And even then, they wouldn’t be Cruise.

They wouldn’t be this guy.

But the deepfake future is more than cost-effective, it’s safe.

Since the death of DVD retail, Hollywood is more anxious than ever about actually making their money back. They own nostalgic properties, yes, but without the actors associated with the original material, re-monetisation of those franchises poses a serious challenge. Paul Walker, for example, is so entrenched in the audience’s memory of the Fast and Furious franchise, that director Justin Lin discussed digitally reviving his corpse for the tenth film in the franchise, Fast X.

And this is how the deepfake film ushers in the safest iteration of cinema yet. No more recasts, no more death. No more ageing actors forcing screenwriters to shoehorn time travel into their franchise. No more scheduling conflicts. No more inconvenient overdoses, nor sexual misconduct dashing trilogy plans. No more controversial political stances spoiling merchandising opportunities. The software renders the body double faceless, which in turn ensures they remain nameless and devoid of all negotiating leverage. This is the reliability of working with software. A software cannot age or die. A software cannot unexpectedly get too obese for direct sunlight.

A software cannot say ‘no’.

Even for the final crop of A-list actors, the deal works out. After lending out their likenesses, they’ll bid farewell to green screens and keep to the more dignified pastures of activism and award ceremonies. Only the next generation of actors and actresses will suffer, but we won’t know their names so as to mourn their loss. After all, why would studios invest in a young and attractive up-and-comer, when they can simply scan in pre-surgery Megan Fox?

Of course, we could say no to all of this. We could walk out of that theatre right now. We could ask our digital companion back home to instead read aloud this week’s trivia quiz, as we reconstitute premium protein packets and sprinkle on a sachet of ethically sourced, carbon neutral, and wholly unidentifiable flavouring.

But would we?

II.

Let’s look at the data. After all, perhaps our viewing habits are a victim of circumstance. Perhaps we are forced to consume these regurgitations due to factors outside of our control. For a little insight into our own nature, let’s look at music. From , emphasis mine:

Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market, according to the latest numbers from MRC Data, a music-analytics firm. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—should look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.

Is Old Music Killing New Music?
Ted Gioia

Left to our own devices, we, collectively, are choosing to go back through the musical catalogue. We are choosing Tupac over Doja Cat at an increasingly alarming rate. If the trend continues, we will feasibly reach a time when new music will be entirely suffocated by old music. If new music is made, no one will listen to it. Even if some of us do, we will be such a relatively minuscule audience that it won’t be economically viable for those artists regardless.

‘New’ is also a relative term.

From the perspective of the individual, the discovery of good, old music is no different to the discovery of good, new music. After all, if it’s new to us – does it matter if it’s not really new at all? Arguably, we’re at this point already. Spotify boasts over 80 million tracks at the time of writing. At a very conservative estimate of two minutes per song, if we listened to sixteen hours’ worth of music every day from the moment we were born, we’d still barely eke out maybe a fifth of the 457 years that we would need to cover humanity’s entire preserved discography.

And if we don't want new musicians, why would we want new actors? Maybe we are perfectly content with Tom Cruise, forever. In fact, while we’re here, pick your era. Perhaps rugged Old Man Cruise is not your style. I see you. You're the discerning viewer. We've got you covered. We will find the correct Cruise to get your engine running. What about Risky Business-era Cruise?

Why stop there?

Who else should our sentimentality rescue from a legacy merely immortalised in the body of work they produced during their natural life? What about our favourite podcast host? With some AI magic and enough sample data, we can already emulate folks like Joe Rogan with disturbing accuracy. Sure, that is ‘only’ his voice and appearance, but AI is already writing full novels and responding to complex queries in natural language. Soon the empty digital soul of Joe Rogan will riff on news topics for the rest of internet eternity.

Maybe you don’t like Joe Rogan. Maybe you don’t like the idea of Tom Cruise as Rocky Balboa in the 2049 remake of Rocky. That’s alright. We will stream straight to your living room that same film, but starring Jackie Chan instead. Or Sasha Grey. Or Mussolini. Why not? Snapchat’s filters already map, model and shape faces live and in front of us with whatever design we choose. Give a studio the near-future evolution of that technology, the budget, and nine months of skilled CG technicians working on it – and we’ll get whatever weird romances we want, with all the convincing subtleties of actual acting talent performed by the software.

We want this. The studios want this.

What could go wrong?

III.

Frankly, we might worry about the removal of people from the creation of entertainment. Entertainment already walks an impossible balance between being both art and product. Part of why it, at least, sort of works, is because the people working on it, despite all efforts to the contrary, still manage to seep a little of their personality – their artistic intent – into the final product. The more we strip people out, the less of a soul in the end product.

We’ve already seen what can happen when algorithms become directors. These unsettling remixes of content exist devoid of intent, instead informed only by market trends. As exposed in the strange case of Youtube Kids, the results are non-sensical, unnerving, and often implicitly violent:

Ultimately, if we choose to consume nothing new, we’ll also create nothing new. At which point, technology’s grand replacement of mankind may be final, as AI feeds back to us the digital mincemeat of our own history. Historians of a future civilisation will sift through the rubble with confusion. At some point in the mid-twenty-first century, the enduring record of mankind’s evolution, as recorded by our artistic output, appears to end. The soul of the entertainment industry – already just a nervous, flickering pilot light – will finally have been snuffed out. Perhaps a death knell for society’s own collapse.

Or?

Or I'm a pessimist, and after a few decades of watching deceased Chris Hemsworth’s Thor confuse himself with Earth’s customs for the thirty-eighth film in a row, we’ll say ‘enough’. We’ll demand better from Hollywood, and they will acquiesce. Producers will show restraint, relegating deepfakery to tasteful, creatively compelling use, rather than as a cheap trick to get our Memberberries tingling.

And if that doesn’t happen, maybe something else will save us. Perhaps another Carrington Event will occur, and the sun’s sudden lashing of solar flares will rescue us from that stagnant, digital bath in a flash of sizzling electrics. A hard reset. The four hundred-year reboot that our franchise needed.

On that day, Tom Cruise won’t be there to save us. But he’ll be with us in the only place we ever truly needed him. In our hearts. In our fond memories of A Few Good Men and Jerry Maguire. The most salient of his films might be passed on, generation to generation, through spirited retellings around a campfire of burning tyres, their moral lessons etched into our lineage. Tom Cruise. Not a soulless, digital husk, perpetually at the edge of tomorrow, but living folklore. An oral history of his triumphs. The life of Tom Cruise. The legend of Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise, Forever.

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I.

When I was a boy, I would help my aunt with the shopping. Once home, her first task was to rescue any purchased food products from their plastic packaging. Only glass could be trusted. Even metal could betray you. We had argued, standing in the kitchen, about the ‘safety’ of canned goods. I, having not grown up in the time of rampant lead poisoning, viewed metal as a culinary ally. I had also viewed plastic as an ally, but I was not about to start that debate again. Regardless, my aunt had shown me a thin, semi-transparent film around the inside lid of an empty can. That, she claimed, was some kind of plastic or other unnatural compound that could contaminate the food. Naturally, out came the Mason jars.

Now, were the finer points of her aversion to plastic justified? Hard to say. However, this was decades before a study commissioned by the WWF revealed that we might be ingesting as much as a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. My aunt had not had the research per se, but she had possessed the correct instinct. It was the same instinct that had seen her covering the laptop webcam with a thumb of Blu Tack, earning bewilderment from the rest of us. Just as with the plastic, however, years later, iOS14 exposed Instagram for accessing the user’s camera even when not in use. Once again, she was right. While perhaps hit-or-miss on the finer details, the instinct had proved itself as a North Star to orient around. This ‘instinct’ had seen both my aunt and uncle derided as crackpot tree-huggers three decades ago, and as neo-Nazi science deniers today.

They were folks just standing still, the Overton pendulum washing over.

This evolution of pejoratives, from tree-hugger to neo-Nazi, is crucial. If we don’t change the terms we use, we risk comparing the current day to history. In other words, we risk realising our own hypocrisy, for as we celebrate the rebels of yesterday, we condemn the rebels of today. We’re desperate to define today’s rebels as new and different to those we mistakenly ignored in the past. The anti-war folk of yesterday were unpatriotic, but the anti-war folk of today are unempathetic. What will they be tomorrow? Cowardly? Xenophobic? The actual political position will stay the same, true, but the adjective will change and therefore our perception too.

For it is not enough to dismiss the past, we must also tirelessly update our definition of today’s reality. This happens daily. Once quietly confessed to by the establishment, conspiracies become common sense. That which was obnoxious speculation yesterday is obvious today. We catch ourselves saying, of course our phones spy on us – duh! – forgetting how we had scorned a friend for claiming the same thing just a few years ago. Fiction becomes fact overnight. This is how we never learn. If we were never wrong in the past, why would we ever be wrong in the future?

Old arrogance is refreshed with new arrogance.

In this way, we relegate the mistakes of the past to the sole domain of our bigoted ancestors. Witch hunts, crusades, lobotomies, and electroshock therapy – how barbaric, how unthinkable. We in the modern age are beyond such things. Unless, as Stanley Milgram demonstrated in his infamous experiments on obedience to authority, a stoic gentleman in a white lab coat calmly assures us that in fact we must obey, and that all responsibility is theirs. Perhaps then, in that moment we will turn up the voltage on our fellow participant because, “in the interest of science… one goes through with it”.

The philosopher and essayist George Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But let us offer an addendum. To resign the past to simply a time of bigotry, is to condemn yourself to repetition just the same – but with a self-satisfied twinkle.

Let us then take stock of our own pathology, as described above.

1. The people deemed ‘wrong’ today are unlike the people deemed ‘wrong’ yesterday.

2. Claims made by such ‘wrong’ people, once verified, were plainly obvious all along.

3. This whole business of being ‘wrong’ is a bit of an old-world problem anyway.

In short, to us, you’re either insane or annoying.

We therefore never grant kudos to those possessing a little more wisdom, a little better instinct, or a little more forethought than ourselves. They were insane yesterday, they’re annoying today, and they’ll be insane again tomorrow. All that said, seeing as we’ve safely relegated these folks to the sidelines, perhaps we can examine them at a safe distance. What exactly is the case for their abandonment of consensus, anyway? What is the case for science denial?

II.

In a world simultaneously post-truth and yet incessantly fact-checked, it can be tempting to entirely forgo any sense of definitive, knowable truth. Today, we’re all a few keystrokes away from validating any preconception we arrived at the keyboard with – be they via ‘official’ or ‘independent’ sources online. Forbes warned us against this sort of behaviour, declaring with a provocative headline, “You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science”. I would have preferred a more straightforward headline:

Accept The Current Consensus And Nothing Else.

The problem with this framing of course, is the term ‘current’, for it betrays a flaw with the original argument. We can look backwards with scorn, but never forward with skepticism. And just what horrors are we committing today that we will look back on and shiver? We can’t know for sure, of course, but God forbid we speculate. Trouble is, when we do indulge in a little of our ‘own research’, we’re met with a combination of the following: research supporting the current consensus, research that does not support said consensus, well-intended speculation, and the standard dose of old-fashioned, red-blooded misinformation. Somewhere in that stew of thought and documentation lies a truth that will only be retroactively known at an unspecified point in the future.

The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in “truth”. And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Colonel & Rose,
Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001)

At this point, we have a few options. We can shrug, stand up, and head to the local milk bar in apathy. Alternatively, we could accept the current consensus and download the next safe-for-consumption update from our nearest device. Alternatively, we could become reactionaries, dismissing all official reports solely due to their officialness, and consume the independent sources, the speculation, and the misinformation with indiscriminate gusto. We might even oscillate between all three. But I suspect there is a fourth option lurking about. Perhaps we forgo any hope of truly and definitively sorting the endless chaff and instead turn inwards. We can ask our own personal value structures what they are telling us.

How… scientific?

Admittedly, it is not scientific at all. However, we are not technically looking for science – we’re looking for the truth. Science can align with truth and with good, as it has with many great scientific discoveries. But it can also align with falsehood and with evil, as it has with a great many crimes against humanity. Science, in this way, exists in the same limbo of uncertainty as even sheer barstool speculation – time and chance happeneth to them all.

This is easy to forget of course, because science catches up, just as we do. Science once told us that mixed-race children were intellectually inferior, but it has since forgotten its own misgivings. The medical industry invoked the name of science as it hooked millions on OxyContin, but that too slips the mind. Truth, on the other hand, is more stoic. Yogic principles have held value for the human body many millennia before scientific studies verified them. Fundamental truths are true today, just as they were at the beginning of time.

Truth is eternal, science is evolving.

None of this is to say that all official reports need be condemned. We are not reactionaries and the Earth is not flat. Official reports and independent commentary alike must be reviewed critically, of course. They must also be reviewed philosophically, however, for objective fact requires a philosophical lens with which to have meaning. Let us demonstrate this with an example. Consider the following statement.

Human beings are profoundly complex organisms.

Assuming we agree semantically, this could be considered an objective fact. If so, what is its objective meaning? This depends on who is evaluating it and what their personal beliefs are. A creationist might say, “Human beings are in fact so profoundly complex, that only God could have made them.” Alternatively, an evolutionist might say, “Human beings are indeed so profoundly complex, that only four and a half billion years of evolution could have produced them.” The fact itself possesses no allegiance. Now, a more topical and political example.

Lockdowns slow pandemic spread.

Once again, this could easily be considered an objective fact, but does it mean that we must plunge our country into an economically catatonic state for somewhere between two weeks and eternity, while policemen enforce social distancing via pandemic-era quarterstaffs? Of course not. There is no direct line from statistical analysis to the suspension of civil liberties. More broadly, there is no direct line from reality to policy. It is our reality that thousands of people die swimming every year, yet it is not our policy to outlaw breaststroke. To draw such a line is to inject our own worldview into the equation.

This is only natural, mind you. Every day, we take what objective facts we can, inject what philosophical convictions we possess, and conclude what action we ought to take. This is normal behaviour. To outsource this process however, to let an appointed authority make this evaluation on our behalf, to let them decree that “attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science” – that is to surrender our self-governance and unconsciously adopt the worldview of those who would proclaim themselves our betters.

Science™ is not science, any more than a picture is the vista. The institution of science is not itself science, just as a church is not itself belief. A person conflating the object with the ideal is a person worthy of our suspicion. In short, ‘follow the science’ reduces to just ‘follow me’.

III.

Is this really, ‘the case for science denial’, then?

In a word, yes. This is the case for science denial, in that it is the defence of those ridiculed as ‘science deniers'. Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were ‘science deniers’. To assert that the Earth revolves around the sun, they had to deny that the sun revolves around the Earth. At worst, ‘science denier’ is a slur, meaning, “one who, in time may or may not be vindicated, but whom we shall slander regardless”. And at best, science denial is itself a part of science, the necessary antagonist that drives our story forward.

Let us assume for now that we have put science in its place, neither irrationally sidelined nor ingested unquestioningly. What does it mean to interview our own personal value structures, and to use that process to interpret the world? Where do these value structures come from? It is likely different for many people – a philosophical stance, a spiritual orientation, a religious edict, or perhaps simply a sheer but definite sense of existential unease. This thing, this guiding light, is in some sense the truest, most fundamental expression of identity. Whether found in a book, in the stars, or simply even in your own decades of experience – a source of inner truth is inseparable from human nature. It cannot be wrenched away by the scorn of consensus, nor crushed underfoot by the boot of authority. Even in the gulags, the soul survives the barbed wire, to both borrow and butcher a phrase.

It cannot be re-educated into extinction.

The inclination we see to frame recent political debates as “science versus anti-science” is telling. That nervousness betrays not a firm grasp of science, but a slipping grasp on consensus. A more accurate diametric would be “consensus versus dissidence”. My aunt needed no citation when she declared plastics a pariah. You could have fact-checked her until the sun went down, and I tried, but it would not have put a single dent in her resolve. For it was not something perpetually updated and reshaped at the whim of a new Vice thinkpiece. It was rooted in something deeper.

We won’t always be right, far from it. In fact, worse than potentially being wrong is definitely being unpopular. But what is the shame in unpopularity? Martin Luther King, Jr. was unpopular even among the white moderates who claimed to be his allies. Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian scientist and physician, was so unpopular with his colleagues that they had him institutionalised. The belief that condemned him, in the context of the recent political landscape, is chillingly ironic.

Semmelweis advocated for hand-washing, to reduce patient mortality.

Unfortunately, he was unable to devise a theoretical explanation for his findings. As such, he was fact-checked into oblivion by his peers and by the scientific consensus of the time. He spent his final days in an insane asylum, where he was beaten nearly to death and shortly died of gangrene. To put a perhaps unnecessarily fine point on it, the adherents to consensus that saw Forbes lauding Semmelweis for his achievements two years ago, are the same adherents to consensus that would have condemned him to exile – had they been contemporaries.

If these are the people of history whom we honour in our dissidence, in our pursuit of truth, then unpopularity is the toll we pay. But the attempt to align yourself with that intangible and eternal truth is a far more practical and worthwhile endeavour than simply being ‘up-to-date’ with the consensus of our time. That might, finally, be something worth doing. Or trying to do.

For if truth is eternal, so is its pursuit.

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