wtf: The horror of parallel social dimensions
Human platform fragmentation is the actual worst
I don’t know about you, but 2016 has me politically motion sick.
Here’s where I’m struggling: I need a model to explain this. I need it bad.
I can deal with any chaotic circumstance if I can build a reasonably complete model that helps me feel I understand it. The modeling keeps me busy and it helps guide my decisions. I like to believe I have a good reason for making the bets I do.
Today’s raw politics are straightforward enough. The confluence of technological change, demographic shifts and and mounting wealth inequality can reasonably explain the world around me.
What’s harder is the people behind the politics. How can we occupy the same place, the same time, the same reality, yet come to such wildly different conclusions? How can we be so equally convicted to such opposing sets of truths?
Where is the missing model?
It’s some science fiction shit. Same physical reality. Alternate social realities. Some of us occupy a completely different sense of social physics than do others. The very fabrics of our social realities have different qualities and textures. How did this happen?
It seems my whole circle is thunderstruck by Sapiens. It’s a tour de force history of human culture. It manages the page-turning thrust of a Clancy novel with the voice of a passionate, thoughtful teacher. One of its central arguments is a model for explaining collective human success:
How did Homo sapiens come to dominate the planet? The secret was a very peculiar characteristic of our unique Sapiens language. Our language, alone of all the animals, enables us to talk about things that do not exist at all. […]
Fiction is nevertheless of immense importance, because it enabled us to imagine things collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. And it is these myths that enable Sapiens alone to cooperate flexibly with thousands and even millions of complete strangers.
So, social reality is a shared project.
While the physical reality is objective—a bullet is a bullet no matter what I believe—the social reality, as a shared fiction, is subjective. Social reality is whatever you and I agree it is.
But let’s say we don’t agree.
If it’s just you and me, we have two choices. We can negotiate a consensus or there’s violence. Those seem to be the ways we apes play this out.
Let’s say we add one more person to the mix.
The third agrees with you, but not with me. Agreement is less work than violence or negotiating consensus, so you both spend more time collaborating on a social reality, while excluding me.
Then a fourth joins, and their reality is a lot closer to mine.
See where this goes?
Tribalism, whether we like it or not
Communication is hard work. You need shared symbols. You need the assurance that spending the effort on communication will be rewarded with understanding. Understanding creates trust and stability, so if you know you’re going to die one day, you’ll invest your finite life on the stuff that best rewards those goals.
You ever meet two people who grew up speaking the same language, but live somewhere dominated by a different tongue? They’ll give each other a little cognitive break by speaking the words of their childhoods, each sparing the other any overhead from mental translation.
This also comes out in people who’ve shed an accent they grew up with. While speaking with friends or family with that same accent, they may seamlessly switch it back on for maximum comprehension.
Point is, we each run social software in order to get along.
But not all of the software is compatible. In fact, some of the software may be completely incompatible, so opposed are its points of consensus. That is, our shared ideas of how reality should work.
Humanity has a couple of familiar options: renegotiate for greater software compatibility, or violence.
Same idea as when we were one-on-one, except we scale from a fist fight to a tank skirmish. Or, under the worst case scenario, a world war.
Can we get back to the part where this explains 2016?
Now that we’ve covered the premise of the model, sure. Let’s do it.
So we have the model that tells us that social reality is based on shared fictions. Because those fictions may not be compatible, our social software suffers from a sort of fragmentation. Some of us are not socially compatible with others.
Portrait of a platform: Trump’s America
In Trump’s America, the American Dream was real. Once upon a time.
Trump’s America recalls the halcyon days of post-war economic expansion, driven by social programs, wartime industrialization and minimal wealth inequality. People could afford homes, raise their kids, enjoy a comfortable retirement.
In Trump’s America, all it took was hard work.
Once.
Today, hard work isn’t enough. Some people are reaching middle age and finding themselves helplessly exhausted, depressed and addicted. Even suicidal. Student debt is out of control. Many work multiple jobs just to make ends meet. This is not the America that was promised.
Nor the one remembered.
Make America great again. This appeal rings hard in an operating system fatigued by overwork, despair and memories of a better time. Trump’s America wants it back the way it was.
Obama’s America
Barack Obama is the 44th US President. The first black president. With a historic election came historic scrutiny. Was he telling the truth about his religion? Was he even a United States citizen? Just where was his birth certificate, anyway?
Barry has spent the last eight fucking years of his life working around millions of people asking him over and over to prove he belongs where the American people sent him.
But to many of the people who were most excited by Obama’s election, this behavior was nothing new or surprising. They were used to being scrutinized, even excluded. Followed around retail stores by security. Pulled over by police on flimsy pretenses. In Obama’s America, enduring social skepticism is a way of life.
In Obama’s America, many were not allowed to swim at a swimming pool because of the color of their skin. In Obama’s America, school segregation exists both in living memory and modern reality.
In contrast to a prosperous 50’s and 60’s, Obama’s America struggled for political power in the civil rights movement. It sustained economic disadvantage from housing discrimination to predatory lending to exclusionary labor practices.
For Obama’s America, life has always been pretty fucked up. Life is dictated by a widening racial wealth gap that places black and latinx median household net worth at 13x and 10x lower than white households.
In Obama’s America, there’s no past greatness to go back to. Only future greatness through optimism and hard work.
Millennial America
Most who graduated from college in the last eight years got a bad deal.
They entered some the roughest job markets in decades. They incurred record student debt. They labor under the worst wage stagnation in generations. Millennials know what it is to get by on less, and to compromise in the process.
Meanwhile, lackluster outcomes for millennials create intense scrutiny. Discourse on this from older generations has largely blamed millennial attitudes more than economic constraints. So Millennials get kicked twice, not only in the objective economic reality, but also in the subjective shared fiction.
It’s a rough spot to be in.
Other platforms
There are plenty more. Americas defined by everyone from Hillary Clinton to Beyonce to street preachers to weirdos on internet hate sites to beloved Univision anchor Jorge Ramos. Interestingly, some Americans may run code from multiple Americas, as their identities and values intersect with different constellations of fiction, conviction and political identity.
The point is, our shared fictions, along with their social incompatibilities, very neatly sort us into very different social realities where most of the people we encounter reach similar conclusions from the facts at hand.
Consensus failure
In 2016, America’s largest social software platforms will break down into three camps:
- Hillary Clinton should be president
- Donald Trump should be president
- Some other person should be president
The first two are likely to be biggest. They’ll be comprised of a coalition of different social realities. Not everything about their fictions will be fully compatible. But they’ll be compatible enough to agree on who to vote f0r.
Then there’s the violence.
So far it’s slurs and scuffles at rallies. It’s brutal police encounters. It’s hate speech on the internet.
It’s not the first time. It’s just what happens when people can’t agree.
So that’s the model. We’re tribal. There are practical reasons why, no matter how maddeningly stupid, violent or frustrating the outcome may be. Our tribal lines are drawn according to information and the cost of transmitting it successfully to other human minds. Information whose maintenance is a fundamentally shared task.
There’s a lot room in a distributed system of hundreds of millions of nodes for a fragmented estimate of reality.
