Real World Mad Libs

I've dabbled with the notion that we're living in a simulation as a thought exercise from time to time. Even wrote about it in these here pixels a while ago. Thought about it a lot more recently, and I've come to what seems to be an inescapable conclusion.

We are, in fact, living in a simulation. But it's more than just a garden-variety matrix. That'd be too simple. No, my friends, we're actually living inside the Mad Libs of a smart, slightly-deranged teenaged god. Think an adolescent Mark Leyner with the power to control an entire universe.

Leyner himself (or perhaps the ur-Leyner that's pulling the strings) has alluded to the reality of our existence in his work. For example, this quote from The Tetherballs of Bougainville: “We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence!” Or this bit of worlds within worlds wink and a nod, “Even those who consider all this total bullshit have to concede that it's upscale, artisanal bullshit of the highest order.” 

I could go on. Okay, one more - this, from The Sugar Frosted Nutsack, “fate is the ultimate preexisting condition.”

The case is pretty solid. And our teen god overlord has been on a heater of late. George Santos is a particularly inspired bit of comedyparodypathos. Classified documents strewn across the various living quarters of a succession of senior political leaders, a nice touch, especially the back and forth to the point of stereophonic barking of the partisans on both side. Tucker Carlson going after M&M's for being gay and getting Mars to change the characters' costumes and roll out Maya Rudolph in what has to have been a bit where all the principals dutifully played their parts. Fucking balloons that might be aliens engaging in dogfights with F-22 aircraft all over the North American continent!

The mass shootings, though, that'll bring you back to "reality".

Towards a Unified Theory of Fuckery

I have found it difficult to cogently articulate my thoughts about certain aspects of this juncture in our common history as a nation. Mostly it's because of the inchoate rage. We are being intentionally misled and divided by any number of actors foreign and domestic, and our institutions aren't up to the task of separating fact from fiction from fuckery.

I'm gonna get the words out now, though, because OBFT XXIX starts on Thursday, and I want this off my chest so I have a clean mind and a full heart as I make the drive south. 

The specific topic of my colére du jour starts very close to home. Loudoun County, Virginia is the epicenter of a manufactured controversy about the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in public schools. I know it's a manufactured controversy because the manufacturer said so. As this piece in The Intelligencer explains, a once-obscure documentarian with a questionable grasp of the truth named Christopher Rufo has been the driving force of the anti-CRT right. And his motivation is transparent, as he himself says in the article:

"He takes critical-race theory as a concept, strips it of all meaning, and repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. “The goal,” [Rufo] tweeted, “is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think ‘critical race theory.’ We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.” In an interview with the Post, he said the tweet described an “obvious” approach: “If you want to see public policy outcomes you have to run a public persuasion campaign.”"

Repurposes it as a catchall for white grievances. Where have we heard that before? The Tea Party comes to mind. The entirety of Donald Trump's movement, as well. Hell, it's Fox News' unofficial SOP. It's some bold-ass shithouse jiu jitsu to transform an academic examination of systemic racism and use it to paint non-whites and their allies as the bad guys.

It's shitty on its face, but it's made worse by the fact that it's so goddamn successful, the willfully misled being influenced by the willfully misleading. Author and professor Ibram X. Kendi stated it plainly in The Atlantic this week, saying "[Republican operatives] have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster." 

The dingus at left lives a few blocks from me. 
The crazy is too goddamn close.

And right here in Loudoun, it worked like a fucking charm. A recent school board meeting resulted in arrests and the halting of public comment as 'concerned parents' lost their everlovin' minds about the county's deployment of CRT in schools. Which never. fucking. happened. But Rufo and Trump administration alum Ian Prior said it did, and that was good enough for these racist fucks.

There's lots to read about what's going on in Loudoun, so I won't belabor it. I believe (hope?) that it's a very vocal and very small minority giving us a bad name, but I know that all of this nonsense is being fomented by forces far beyond the locals. But it's of a piece with the division that cuts across so many dimensions of our current body politic. 

Which leads to me to the real point of this post. I think we're living in a simulation. (Didn't see that coming, did you?)

You may be familiar with Swedish philosopher/academic Nick Bostrom's 2003 paper entitled, "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?". Rather than synopsizing it, here's the entirety of the abstract:

This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed.

This man might not actually exist.

Effectively, Bostrom and his adherents argue that future humans will be sufficiently advanced to run simulations based upon prior human conditions in order to predict their own potential futures, and that we're living in one of them.

This explains a lot of shit, frankly. No way the Boston Red Sox go 86 years between World Series titles in a real world, for example. The USA probably doesn't beat the Soviets in hockey, either. And it's impossible that Donald J. Trump becomes President of the United States of America in a real plane of existence.

It helps me clear my mind, too. Charlatans like Rufo and Prior will endeavor to divide, dissemble, and distract, but now that I know they're not real, I can ignore them and focus on the important stuff. Like finding the red pill.

Oh, crap.