The Great Pause Week 68: A Martian and a Whale Walk into a Bar
"Digital atomization of the human family brought forward a primal longing for belonging that fed a toxic tribalism."
A million years from now, when the descendants of microbes that hitchhiked on a Chinese manned mission to Mars return to Earth and try to reconstruct what happened, maybe the distant descendant of a whale will tell them it was Facebook.ioph
Said the whale to the Chinese lab leak:
They were a magnificent race and arguably you might never have existed without them. The social adaptations that led to advanced sciences and space travel evolved from a context of small, land-dwelling, hunter-gatherer groups — epigenetically adapted herd animals running upright and solving problems as a group through vocalizations and gestures. Perhaps their frames of reference — and their neocortices — expanded by regular contact with especially communicative plants and fungi.
“Although never to the degree that our own species’ brain-to-bodymass and processing power has,” the whale hastily added.
Failing a biological endowment or the soundwave propagation advantages of aquatic environments, they developed elaborate prosthetic media to communicate over greater distances with more dispersed networks using binary digital electromagnetic coding. They evolved from mechanical devices called telephones, to personal computers and AR headsets, to brain implants and genetically modified “superhumans.”
Sadly, all that took them farther away from direct contact with the real world before their improved computational ability gave them the foresight to project the consequences of their technologies and the industrial civilization used to produce them. Hypnotized by the virtual worlds they were creating, they drifted farther and farther from meaningful contact with their fellow beings, both among their own species and with all their relations, my own ancestors included.
The whale paused and looked off to the clouds. “We might have told them so much,” she said wistfully.
Adaptation to their new virtual world distanced them from the biogeophysical realities they derisively called “Default World.” They were ill-equipped to make rapid and effective collective behavioral responses to sudden, catastrophic climate change, food and water security, cascading zoonoses, and nuclear proliferation.
Towards the end — past the point where manned missions to Mars were launched but thankfully before my family was extinguished — atomization of the human family from large, multigenerational units into nuclear pairs and then solitary units with sexual avatar companions — almost unnoticeably gravitating from single breadwinners to multi-earner, overworked families struggling to keep up with vampire loan demands and social pressures towards conspicuous consumption — brought forward a primal longing for belonging that fed a toxic tribalism.
It might have been averted if they had only paused to reflect on what they were doing, but the hand-held and head-worn screens triggered rapid eye movements reminiscent of the early hunter gatherer reflex. It grasped them firmly to a genetic breast. Both the structure of their digitized social networks and the patterns of information flow through them were directed by engineering decisions that maximized profitability for the handful of founders, called “unicorns,” who became spectacularly wealthy at the expense of everything else.
These drivers were largely opaque to the driven, effectively unregulated, and sequestered from ecological feedback. The functional consequences only became clear in retrospect, by which time it was too late, and the human species went extinct, leaving behind a huge mess that even after a million years is still being suffered by those of us remaining
Of course, expanding the scale of a collectively behaving system — they knew it only as “social media” — by eight orders of magnitude in less than a decade was certain to come to a bad end. That scale of change is disallowed in the natural biological world for good reason. It is ecologically unstable. In the human social context, it created needless conflict and eroded familial cooperation. It altered entire populations’ abilities to make accurate decisions, reach clear consensus even on simple facts, or cooperate to govern themselves. Highly placed individuals — generally for reasons arbitrary to the competence required of their position — were given outsized influence. The popularity of leaders came not from socially beneficial attributes of character but as a result of ability to manipulate communications and emotional responses, taking advantage of “influence” algorithms — not possible historically or evolutionarily — to spread misinformation.
Macroscopic features of communication breakthroughs should have encouraged stronger and enduring interconnectedness, transnational and transdisciplinary collaborations, dissemination of scientific ideas, citizen engagement in science and politics, and overcoming isolation. Instead, they brought echo chambers, polarization, difficulty coordinating responses to pandemics or natural emergencies, eroded trust in government, nefarious actors causing local economic political instability to serve their own ends, “information gerrymandering,” and manipulated elections. Hysteria driven by unreliable information became so normalized that broader social governance became ineffectual at best, counterproductive at worst.
There were those who correctly read these trends and attempted interventions, but they were outnumbered and overwhelmed by contrary, short-term-profit-oriented persons who kept building algorithms designed to recommend information and products in line with anti-survival outcomes. These created runaway feedback such that a subset of users enraged by emotionalized and moralized misinformation triggered the apocalypse that ended the race even before climate change had its chance to.
“Such a pity,” the Martian archaeologist said.
“Maybe,” said the whale. “And maybe not.”
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Note: The animal pictured in the image at the top of the article is actually not a whale but a whale shark, but then, after a million more years of evolution, who knows what a whale may look like?
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As the world confronts the pandemic and emerges into recovery, there is growing recognition that the recovery must be a pathway to a new carbon economy, one that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backwards — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience.
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“There are the good tipping points, the tipping points in public consciousness when it comes to addressing this crisis, and I think we are very close to that.”
— Climate Scientist Michael Mann, January 13, 2021.
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