The Disappearance of Reality

 

Do you ever wonder why he gets away with it?  Or even why he thinks he can get away with it?

Boss Chaos lies with every breath, even when the evidence he is lying is right in front of everyone's eyes.  (Or is it?)

For instance, according to Chaos the US has won his war against Iran ("Mission Accomplished," he said this past week) and oil tankers are sailing happily through the Strait of Hormuz, which is completely open.  The evidence against these is on par with the evidence against his contention that his poll numbers are soaring.

He started his first term in office the same way--he claimed his Inaugural crowd was bigger than Obama's, while a baffled press (many of whom were at both) looked at the photographs and were embarrassed for his press secretary, recently one of their own, who nevertheless kept asserting what everyone could see was not true.

Chaos never stops.  Why does he get away with it?  There are a couple of procedural answers.  First, because the news media has gone numb on constantly correcting him.  But most importantly for him, he counts on his supporters being low information voters and/or so cynical about actual news media information that they believe only him.  If he says it is so, it must be so. That may be less true than it used to be, but it's still what he counts on.

Many others no longer concern themselves with whether his latest whopper is false, but take these statements as suggesting what he is going to do or not do, so they can act or react accordingly.  Because he's the Boss backed up by a corrupt Supreme Court, what matters most is what reality is according to him, not what reality is.

But there is also something more profound going on, that Boss Chaos is taking advantage of, whether he knows it or not.  It goes beyond the disappearance of the shared reality most of the country used to have, based on more or less trusted news media and institutions.  True, the news media that at least tried to maintain integrity and objectivity has been severely wounded or utterly transformed into ideological tools.  They also have fewer resources--so there are fewer reporters sending back images and accounts of for instance what's happening around Iran and the Strait, so the counter evidence is thin.  

And some institutions (like Congress) have lost what credibility they had, while others (and this is very important) have been destroyed by Boss Chaos and his minions, for instance those that applied information gathering and expertise to data in areas of science, health, intelligence, the law and the environment.  

But there's something larger still.  I'll make two assertions briefly (which I may develop more fully in future posts) and suggest broad implications.

Both of these are related to the obvious sea change in contemporary life: the dominance of the digital domain, and its ongoing replacing of reality with digital fantasies.

1. The Disappearance of People

Contributing to the disappearance of reality is the disappearance of people, even if it is a real person on the other end of the phone.  

Recently a truck belonging to AT&T backed into Margaret's car and caused some minor and mostly cosmetic damage. The driver apologized profusely, said it was his fault, and called it in to AT&T.  Margaret contacted her insurance agent who tried to contact AT&T and their insurance company. But she was confronted with what confronts us all: an impenetrable wall of "digital assistants," of robots programmed for easy answers and evasion.  Long waits--hours--to talk to a human, which direct the caller to another number that is an entrance to the same kind of endless loop.

Her insurance agent never did even get a phone number for anyone at AT&T that handled insurance on its vehicles. This is apparently not an isolated or unusual case, when big corporations and insurance are involved.  But we see the same evasions everywhere.  The hours of frustration necessary to cancel a digital service, the lack of customer service phone numbers or email addresses on web pages; in a word, the disappearance of people.

AT&T apparently has no face in our town.  Except for a store selling phones and services, there is no physical AT&T office, let alone somebody at a front desk that can tell you who you need to talk to.  I grew up in a small town--however frustrating the ultimate response, you always had someone you could talk to at the phone company, the electric or gas company, and everywhere else.  There was a limit to how unresponsive they could be because they lived in the same community.  You always knew somebody who worked there, or somebody whose cousin did. They (if they exist and talk to you at all) didn't live in an unknown country remote from anything you know.  It was even that way when we moved here in 1996.  Not anymore.

It's also worth recalling that back when there was but one Phone Company, you interacted with real people (operators, they were called) for many years when making phone calls, and even after touch-tone phones etc. you could still speak to "directory assistance," the heirs of "Information." Once the Bell System was broken up and the road to dominance by a few huge companies began, the business became selling the phones you used to get for free, and that's apparently where the money went to pay people who talk to people.    

(There are some compensatory changes, however.  Margaret's insurance agent got that company to pay for repairs at a local body shop, where real people were very pleasant and helpful and efficient, and they all signed a card thanking her for her business. This also seems like a change.)

People still have people in their lives.  But in necessary interactions with institutions, people have disappeared.  And even in daily life, people are starting to disappear.  Conversations are via texts and aps and social media.  Those people need not even be real, and many of them are not.  There's going to be more of that.  Some people interact more with Alexa than actual humans.  A.I. Alexas are here, as are seductive AI agents, and soon enough they will be visible as well as heard (if they aren't already. I'll probably be the last to know.)  

Prominent people appear on YouTube videos that are complete fabrications, or slop. They never said any of those things, but when you do a search for that person, these videos appear right alongside legitimate ones.  Nothing on social media is trustworthy.  Because real people are disappearing in the murk.

2. The Disappearance of Things 

We live in a material society, that's the common wisdom--but do we?  In the era of fast (and quickly disposable) fashion, are the clothes actually real?  As garbage they certainly are--and they are a major problem. As clothes they are mostly plastic and quickly fall apart, they can't be repaired or altered even if there were tailor shops or sewing machines in every home, which there used to be.  

They aren't things really--they are symbols, status symbols, statements, badges of belonging.  But nobody cares about (or cares for) the fabric, the stitching, the durability.  Same with shoes.  Everybody wears running shoes or their equivalents, which are designed to be replaced every few months.  But you can't actually replace them--the version you had is obsolete, there are fifteen new styles (even if they are all more or less the same as each other.)

But perhaps most important in this context are the things that used to carry what we now clump together as information, or data, or more often, as content.  Physical books are replaced by digital content. Physical newspapers and magazines by online versions. Physical containers of recorded music (records, tapes, CDs)  are replaced by digital access to ITunes and Spotify; physical containers of movies (tapes, DVDs, Blueray) are replaced by access to streaming services.

 Granted that physical media that allowed people to take movies home are relatively recent, with recording music available longer, and books longest of all.  And that they replaced to some extent the group experiences of concerts, movies at the movie house and a night at the theatre.  But physical media were things.  They had existence.  They were not off in some abstract cloud, controlled by corporate entities that change the rules of access or even deny it at their usually profit-driven whim.  You bought it, it was yours, you kept it, and played it when you wanted to.  (That was even true with the first digitalized music--which resided on your Ipod.)

You could see your records, touch your books, stack your movies.  They were real.  You could feel your newspaper or magazine, tear articles out of it, keep it or use it for something else.  You could see other people reading from the same newspaper you were, even at the same time.  You had that in common, even if you were not obsessing about it on social media.

Another great loss is letters.  Letters are a deep part of our culture, and the keepers of humanity in history.  Their loss will be profound.  But their disappearance is a loss already. Physical letters that you can read many times, and many years later.  That you see age.  Like anything you read, you can perceive or appreciate something new when you read it years or decades later.  But it is always a token, a physical thing with its own particularity--the paper its on, the writing itself.  Not emails, texts and instant messaging that disappear into the digital ether from which they came, that barely physically existed.

A lot of reality is what you can see and touch, hear and smell and taste.  These are not only the sensations of reality, they are the ground of reality.  Things.  And their relationships to each other, and to us.

Now songs can be altered, movies reedited, scenes cut out, digital  or audio books withdrawn or censored, news stories distorted without physical evidence, and offered as the real things.  You have no say in this.  No one can change a book on your shelf, but digits in the computer or the "cloud" or cyberspace--can be altered without a trace, or just disappeared.

I would argue that physical life itself is becoming abstracted.  Consider the chaos of the so-called health industry.  And while I'm not going to argue the pros and cons of cremation, it is statistically significant that as the proportion of cremations has increased, the instances of burial or ceremony have decreased.  This is enormously significant, for even in the worst times, most human beings could count on one moment in their lives in which they were the center of ceremonial attention, and that would be their funeral.  There is something about acknowledging the physical remains of the transition from life to death and memory that has been part of every human culture as far back as anyone knows, as well as the community behavior of some other animal species.  It is among other things an acknowledgement of the physical continuity of a community.

Regarding the disappearance of physical media, it would seem that ceding great hunks of your intellectual, emotional and even personal--perhaps even moral--life to control by corporations run by billionaires is daunting enough.  But physical thingness cannot be argued with--things are real.  And when reality is so elusive, fantasy moves in.  And the people who control the fantasies can manipulate what remains of reality, including life itself.  That's what ultimately benefits people like Boss Chaos, and allows him to impose his fantasies on people who know they are not reality, but they thereby become major elements in shared reality with consequences for us all.