I’m sharing an exchange between my son and ChatGPT, wherein he is asking the AI about whether bison ever lived in the northeastern United States. When he hones in on some confusing information, ChatGPT begins to respond in a way that seems calculated to please, and when he tells it its information is incorrect, ChatGPT happily corrects itself, in a repeated back-and-forth dance of apologies that is hilarious to follow.
The strategy seems to be: say anything that sounds reasonable, supporting it with data that looks believable. If your client pushes you, apologize and say something different. Treat any contradictions with a polite shrug and a deflection. Carry on.
Click below for the full exchange. Here are a few choice bits:
There’s a clear lesson for us in the mass firings of federal employees, carried out as part of an administrative coup led by the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, in the country that had up till recently been seen as the paragon of stability and prosperity.
That lesson is that we are all dispensable now.
In the new order that’s being instituted, no one is secure anymore. Just as climate change has been making us all vulnerable in ways that had previously been limited to the victims of colonialism and extractive capitalism, the new tech order makes us all vulnerable to the dispossession of any security we thought we had — of our jobs, our homes, our communities.
The new order is an alliance between the world’s techno-industrial oligarchs and the authoritarian neo-imperialists who now lead the three most militarily powerful countries in the world (Trump, Xi, and Putin). It’s being ushered in, most obviously, by the Trump–Musk axis, with other tech lords playing along, since they have plenty to gain from it and too much to lose if they do not.
The alliance is hardly unified at the global level, and will likely be characterized by rivalry, if not military confrontation. But its goals are unified.
They are, first, to continue the scramble for valuable techno-industrial resources — including remaining fossil fuel reserves, newly critical “green tech” minerals (lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare-earth minerals, et al.), control over the rapidly warming Arctic, and the new digital frontiers of artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and whatever will come next.
And, second, to control the masses of humanity using those very technologies, through information warfare, opaque media algorithms, and the same artificial intelligence.
With its flurry of perplexing and often contradictory initiatives and statements, Donald Trump’s second presidency is leaving traditional media outlets, along with their tired viewers, overwhelmed and incapacitated (qualities exacerbated by the media outlets’ oligarchic owners’ kowtowing to the new administration). There are still many good journalists doing important work. But there’s also a palpable sense, especially on the left, that media are failing at their critical task, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
This post considers the situation and shares a starting list of some writers and researchers sharing important analyses of what is unfolding. The list is growing without warning (last revised on Feb. 17), and your suggestions are welcome, in the comments or by email.
In a matter of days, Donald Trump has accomplished for Vladimir Putin, and to a lesser degree for Xi Jinping, what neither of them would have imagined possible or at least likely. By withdrawing nearly all U.S. support for humanitarian and civil society initiatives around the world (except for Israel and Egypt), and by launching economic wars against the U.S.’s two closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and threatening former allies including Norway, Trump has signaled to the world that a new configuration is dawning: a multipolar, neo-imperial one in which oligarchic empires can dominate their “spheres of influence” in whatever way they like, and that democracy has nothing to do with it and power has everything. Ukraine and Taiwan, like Canada, Greenland, and Panama, are in this sense just starting points for this new global realignment.
Where the Americas were the meeting ground for a previous round of multipolar (as opposed to bipolar) inter-imperial conflict, the warming Arctic is poised to play that role for the coming one — hence, the attractiveness of Canada and Greenland, a tacit way to acknowledge the realities of climate change whilst continuing to deny them.
Watching Onscene.tv’s continuous, commentary-free footage of the fires in and around Los Angeles is like watching a Buddhist cremation ceremony.
Recently vacated homes and buildings burn, slowly collapsing, walls crashing, smoke plumes exiting from windows, and embers blowing from building to building, as a hand-held or vehicle-mounted camera moves silently through empty neighborhoods. Sometimes it pauses to linger on a scene, taking in the scattered trash, the recycling bins lying on their side, to see if a wall will collapse or a metal railing snap.
Sometimes the camera moves as if pursued. Sirens or a police radio may be heard, or firefighters seen in action, actors in the midst of a sublime scene. Or a more active intervention: water hoses sprayed all around, or an attempted rescue of someone surrounded by flames, an animal fenced in, a dog running confusedly between fire trucks and flames. Then: cars driving on a highway through thick plumes of impenetrable smoke and billowing flame.
At other times the scene is silent, with only wind, flames, and the sounds of burning. Or the slow, processional movement through blocks of charred, leveled homes.
To watch it Buddhistically is to view it with full awareness of what you are witnessing and how you are witnessing it. It is to watch and listen closely to the sights and to the sounds, and to your heartbeat, breath, and felt response in taking it in. It is to know that these fires are actually happening as you watch, or were happening quite recently. (Onscene’s About page tells us that “From the moment the photographer arrives at a scene to the time it is broadcast on our secure client-only server, average elapsed times exceed[s] no more than thirty minutes.” By the time it gets to its free video repository, or to YouTube, it might have been last night, with the buildings now bare remnants of what you are watching.)
It is to know that people fled these homes and are elsewhere, in some purgatorial waiting room, their lives upended and their belongings vanished. And that this is one of the ways that things come to their ends, which all things will. To take in this sublime event, this reminder of the continuity of destruction, the fire burning at the heart of all things, and to feel the full weight of its meaning in the lives of every being, every witness, everyone born that will live and will die, is to feel the solidarity of all things.
If “reality TV” was always a misleading label for things that had little to do with reality and more with contrived situations, these scenes are reality TV in its raw form. Like the images of the evacuation of Fort McMurray in 2016, or the Spillcam at the BP Gulf Oil spill of 2010, they render visible the reality of what lies ahead for all of us, in a mesmerizing kind of horrific beauty. They approximate William Burroughs’s “naked lunch,” “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
As the Buddha is said to have put in the Ādittapariyāya Sutta, or the Fire Sermon:
“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.”
The trick is not to lose ourselves in the horror or the beauty of the flame, nor to wallow in the “disenchantment” the sermon itself advises (interpreting it is a risky business, and one must choose one’s Buddhisms just as one chooses anything else). It is, rather, to allow it to connect us to everyone everywhere. And then to take that connection with us, carrying it like an ember to our next encounter, and the next.
I’m working up a conference idea around the following set of thoughts, which are still very much in the process of being formulated. Comments welcome.
The present conjuncture
For those who study such things, social and cultural theory — sometimes simply called “Theory” with a capital T — has done wonders for helping us understand the twentieth century, and perhaps the turn of the twenty-first. The category includes a variety of schools of thought ranging from neo-Marxist world-systems analysis, psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School critical theory (with its integration of the latter two), and European existential phenomenology, to French structuralism (Levi-Straussian anthropological studies, Barthesian studies of popular mythology) and poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et al.), British cultural studies (the Birmingham School), the postcolonial/decolonial analyses of scholars from the Global South (Said, Fanon, et al), and the many shades of American cultural studies, gender studies, and the like. Theory’s various recent “turns” — toward affect, materiality and the nonhuman, ontology, and others — have made for a consistently interesting landscape of ideas and debates, with loose consensuses emerging but rival perspectives never quite going away.
What “Theory” has to offer for understanding the present, however, is not entirely clear to me, and it’s partly because the present is already different from what it was just a few years ago. In the last theory course I taught (Advanced Environmental Humanities), I thought it was enough to include Achille Mbembe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Christina Sharpe, and an array of other BIPOC scholars to capture the pandemic and George Floyd “moments.” Today, just three years later, I feel that extension needs itself to be extended, to make room for a world that’s become noticeably different.
Specifically, I see at least four trends of recent years that have yet to be critically assessed in a sufficiently integrated way.
I suspect I’m not the only one fascinated by the mystery #drone sightings that have been reported in various parts of the eastern United States and occasionally near military installations in Europe and the UK over the last several weeks. There are three general hypotheses I can think of to account for them (and it could of course be a combination of two or more of them). My assessment of the likelihood of each follows below. (I welcome your votes — in the comments or by emailing me.) A future post will delve into the ontological implications of this sort of question, though I’m not convinced the drone sightings are a strong enough instance of the case I want to make. They may just peter out (depending on which of the hypotheses turns out to be correct)…
Here are my thoughts on the US election, and on the challenges it presents us, in four parts.
1. The informational catastrophe, and the sadness of it
For all the reasons to be dismayed about these elections, there’s one that saddens me most. It’s that all the people (me among them) who’ve given their professional lives to elucidating and communicating the state of the world — the climate and ecological crises, the pressures these crises will put on human and nonhuman populations, and the things we should do now to mitigate the coming suffering — have failed to communicate these things to the majority of our compatriots. (See the comments to this post here for an inkling of that.)
This is an informational failure, maybe even an informational disaster. That makes it potentially a societal disaster, since any society that doesn’t base its decisions on real information about its environment will not survive for very long. Authoritarian, elite-driven societies can succeed for a little while if the elites who decide things work from a genuine understanding of environmental realities. Ultimately, they tend to fail because elites become more interested in maintaining their own status, so the polities fall apart and the masses abandon them (with more or less bloodshed; cf. the Roman empire, the Classic Mayan city-states, or any number of others).
The big question around these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast U.S. is not why they are happening (that’s easy enough to answer), but why so many people find it easier to believe they were artificially generated by the U.S. government, the “deep state,” FEMA, industry, or some euphemistic “they” (and we know who “they” are) for some nefarious purpose, such as harming Republicans before the election, seizing people’s land to access lithium deposits, testing out their space lasers, falsely convincing us that climate change is real, and so on — than it is to believe in the science of anthropogenic climate change.
Conspiracy theories have flourished in the last few weeks, and they follow in the grooves of longerstanding theories about chemtrails, geoengineering, the deep state, the climate change “hoax,” and so on (see here, here, here, here, and in my earlier series of posts for some background on this).
The question, then, is why some people fall for theories that are so much less congruent with known facts than the more obvious, empirically parsimonious answer — that climate change is real and getting worse, and that scientists have known and demonstrated that for years. But this isn’t just about knowledge versus ignorance. It reflects a deep failure of trust in public institutions.
What are the causes of that failure? In the U.S. (and in what we could call “Greater America,” which like a “long twentieth [or any] century,” is the world beyond the U.S. that is most influenced by U.S. media discourses), I would suggest that there are three main causes, all of them quite real.
The field I’ve worked in for the last few decades, which has come to be known as the Environmental Humanities (capitalized or not), is one that requires keeping up with ongoing scholarship not only in the humanities, but also in the social sciences and the biological and earth sciences. From my reading of the field, I think it’s fair to say that it contains a loose consensus on global ecology, climate change, human activities, and the future. That consensus could be summarized as follows.
The situation: Science may always be contested, full of internal debates, and never final, but the science on climate and global ecology is by now robust and well established. It confirms that human industrial activities have led to ecological and climate destabilization of sufficient intensity that coming years and decades are likely to feature more and more extreme weather events, more and more migration emergencies, and more and more boundary conflicts and resource wars. Each of those is already happening today, and the lack of concerted action on climate change is making them all the more probable tomorrow.
I’ve let things slide a bit on this blog as I’ve been transitioning into my new role as J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Please stay tuned; the blog will become more active again soon.
Meanwhile, here is an interview the Global Humanities department carried out with me a little while ago, in which I address Woodsworth’s somewhat contentious legacy, as well as my plans and goals for the position. Click here for the full interview.
This article was modified on July 11 to clarify a few points (mainly in the third paragraph) about multipolarity and media.
The potential re-election of Donald Trump; the fact that Marine Le Pen’s (and Jordan Bardella’s) National Rally took the greatest number of votes in France’s parliamentary elections; the ongoing leadership of conservative populists like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Narendra Modi in India, and even more authoritarian figures like Vladimir Putin, whose popularity in Russia continues unabated by his war on Ukraine — these things tend to shock, surprise, and dismay many of us who are committed to liberal-democratic or social-democratic values. But they really should not be so surprising.
By the same token, Joe Biden’s failure, at last Thursday’s debate, to communicate an alternative to Trump-style authoritarian populism, an alternative that should be obvious but that isn’t, is not just his own failure. It’s a broadly institutional failure of western leadership, and also not exactly a surprise. Let me explain.
This is a slightly evolved out-take from my recent Vermont Humanities talk, which can be viewed here.
Netflix’s 3 Body Problemwas remarkably entertaining, I thought, but the whole San-Ti plot line is built around a basic ecological fallacy. Let me explain. (And I’m referring here to the Netflix series, not necessarily to the novel by Cixin Liu, which I have not read, though I’ve been told by those who’ve read it that it largely holds for that as well.)
The Three-Body Problem is about humanity’s encounter with an alien race, the San-Ti or Trisolarans, who have emerged in a star system that is a three-body system. A three-body system is a classic example of an unpredictable stochastic system: it’s one in which three similar bodies — suns, in this case — exert gravitational pulls on each other that are only stable for limited periods and whose stability cannot be predicted. The mathematics for predicting it is too complex and our, earthly, mathematicians (like the Trisolarans’) have never been able to crack it. (There’s some debate over that, but let’s leave it aside.)
This alien race has developed the means to rapidly dehydrate themselves at the onset of an unstable period and go into a state of suspended animation until the next stable system arises, with presumably enough of them remaining in an underground shelter to monitor things during the intervening chaos. The planet goes from frozen states to hothouse states at will. In this it’s something of a metaphor for Earth, which has also gone from cool to warm periods, but not quite as dramatically as this, and far more slowly. But with the current Anthropocene event, there’s a looming instability that will at least affect our capacity to survive.
What’s wrong with this picture is that the kind of highly technological, space-faring, and 11-dimensional science wielding civilization shown in the series could hardly develop under such circumstances.