Showing posts with label simulacrum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simulacrum. Show all posts

Thursday, February 15, 2018

Simulacrum Society, Part 2

  [Part 1 is HERE.]

Muhammad Ali Museum, Louisville, KY
H3: What were some signs of America's decline in 2018? 

H4: Well, obviously, Americans' ignorance of two essential economic terms: 1) inflation; and 2) interest rates. But even when we analyzed whether Americans understood the most basic functions of government, they all seemed to fail. 

In 2018, a prominent politician, Elizabeth Warren, said, "Budgets aren't just numbers on a page. Budgets are about values. And over the past few months, I've fought tooth and nail for Congress to pass a budget deal that reflects our values." 

Her statement is so obviously wrong, she should have been laughed out of office. Consider 2008-2009. The budget, which incentivizes behavior through taxation, "valued" home ownership. If values were your primary focus, then the budget and tax code already encouraged home ownership--a policy that ended in disaster and numerous foreclosures. That's one clue budgets shouldn't be based on values, but so many reasonable objections exist against government spending promoting subjective values, I couldn't possibly list them all. (What if the government wanted to "value" same-sex, opposite sex, or even no-sex marriages?)

In addition, if budgets were about values rather than sustainably supporting an interlinked ecosystem of jobs, then the primary value America stood for in 2018 was the military-industrial complex. What did Warren--who had family members in the military--want to do with military spending? Increase it. She voted for a military budget higher than what the pro-military president requested


H3: Remind me, Warren was a conservative like America's President in 2018, right?

H4: Actually, she was a Harvard law professor and liberal, and her party sought to nominate her to run against the conservative, pro-military incumbent. 


H3: Wait, what? 

H4: The military-industrial complex had completely taken over America by 2018. Orwell's Animal Farm, taught in most secondary schools, had come to life: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” 

Worse, the so-called conservative president wasn't conservative with the budget. His proposals required borrowing one trillion dollars

H3: How could people get away with such blatant misrepresentations?

H4: Because all the numbers were wrong.

Jim Rogers, Street Smarts (2013)
H3: What do you mean?

H4: Let me give you an example. Governments, to increase efficiency, began placing certain services for auction. The lowest bid containing the essential scope of services would be chosen


H3: That sounds like a great idea.

H4: It was--if you could count on people being honest about numbers. In reality, firms would make low bids and interpret the 3 to 10 years contract (called a Master Services Agreement) as not covering much of the necessary work. So if something wasn't specifically included in the original bid or proposal, the firm would do a change order or new mini-contract with additional fees. Basically, the original bid was never the final price. Governments and their service providers added contingencies for unexpected work, but as contracts reached expiration, fewer workers were needed to provide services. In short, the contract envisioned deteriorating customer service and responsiveness over time, coinciding with the service provider's ability to become entrenched.

Complicating matters, the government itself didn't always know the full scope of the projects or its reasonable costs. Some cities would hire outside experts like city managers, but most politicians were lawyers, not construction workers, scientists, electricians, or database managers.

H3: So why privatize? Why not keep the old system?

H4: The catalyst for privatization and outsourcing/insourcing was because government employees had become corrupt under the status quo. They voted themselves benefits unavailable to most private workers and then back-ended their compensation in ways that made balancing a budget unpredictable and more dependent on debt. Every price quoted for any government work, even if completed on time, understated true costs because it failed to include long-term benefit costs. 


No one expected the private sector to become as corrupt and as unaccountable as the public sector. Yet, regardless of who was leading infrastructure projects, they always exceeded initial costsIt's like someone once said: everyone was in on it 

H4: What does that mean? 

H3: It means things don't get progressively worse unless all resistance is removed. In order to prevent resistance, one can either eliminate or co-opt obstacles. 

By 2018, the media--more specifically investigative journalism--and the American legal system, essential to keeping the executive branch in check, had been totally co-opted by the Establishment. Even renowned reporters like Lara Logan were hoodwinked by intelligence analysts into reporting fake news. With newspaper journalism slowly decaying into irrelevance, and the most respected television news outlet having published fake news, the public tuned out or began entertaining non-mainstream sources
From 2001. By 2019, the reverse was true:
most developing countries had better news outlets than most developed ones.
As more and more Americans received their news from non-traditional sources, they started realizing something was wrong, but because they didn't understand inflation or interest rates, no one knew where to begin. People started blaming immigrants, foreign interference, Snowden, WikiLeaks, RussiaFacebook, you name it. 

With Russia, the link was real but tenuous. The real goal was to deflect attention from WikiLeaks/Julian Assange, which had received intercepted cables from various hacker outfits, including hackers affiliated with Russia. These classified cables showed U.S. forces firing on ambulances (see 2007 Baghdad massacre, Ethan McCord, "Collateral Murder") while possibly gaming the rules-of-engagement process designed to prevent civilian deaths. (Short version, assuming audio wasn't added: an Apache pilot under no actual threat could easily receive shoot-to-kill clearance by claiming in comms he saw an RPG even if the RPG had no reasonable chance of being fired or making contact.) 

H4: You're jumping all over the place. 

H3: I'm trying to show that America's strategy in 2018 was to deliberately avoid the truth, which was reasonable in light of the fact that no one really understood the various risks in the interlinked global financial system. 

Our key lesson is that everything that happens, even evil actions, are logical results. If Americans didn't or couldn't understand why their medical bills, education bills, etc., were going up every year without any corresponding increase in quality of life, why wouldn't it make sense to blame outsiders? Why wouldn't it make sense to try to disengage from an uncertain global system? 

H4: But America benefited the most from the global system. 

H3: True, from 1945 to 2001, the world was America's oyster. "When the war [WWII] ended, the United States accounted for two-thirds of the world's industrial output. In 1950, 60 percent of the capital stock of the advanced capitalist world was American. That same year, U.S. corporations accounted for one-third of the world's total GNP." Over time, America realized its greatest strength was using its military, especially its Navy, to control world trade through oil exports, which made its currency the de facto unit of exchange worldwide. 

H4: "In debt we trust."

H3: Exactly--as long as that debt was backed by the U.S. dollar.


H4: Something tells me China wasn't too keen on this arrangement. 

H3: Of course not. "He who has the gold makes the rules," except the "gold" changes every so often. In some places, it was cacao beans; in other places, corn; and still in other places it was pieces of paper granting ownership in companies. Today, it's data. Some pods still use oil, but for the most part, everything today runs on data

H4: I am starting to feel sorry for these Americans. 

H3: I keep trying to tell you--everyone, good, bad, smart, stupid, was in on it. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard summarized America's situation even better than Neil Postman and George Orwell. Imagine a society where everyone could identify Einstein but almost no one could explain anything he discovered, and where the lowest gambler to the highest Supreme Court justice needed debt to survive. 

Allow me two stories. In the 21st century, an unknown Iranian-British-American writer knew two people very well. One of them used to be his best friend. He saw his friend, from a privileged family, go to law school and then get a government job regulating securities. On the way to the civilian job at the SEC, this friend--very pro-military and whose father saw active combat--signed up for a graduate degree while working as a Navy JAG to avoid being deployed to Iraq. 

He bought his way out of being deployed but you won't find anyone more genuinely pro-military than him. When he received the job at the SEC regulating securities, he may have even benefited from federal laws promoting employment of military personnel. The icing on the cake? When he joined the SEC, he had almost zero understanding of securities. He'd never traded a security and couldn't tell you anything about finance in general. 

H4: So a lawyer in charge of regulating the stock market and Wall Street was clueless about both?

H3: Yes, but remember: this was one of the best Americans the country produced. A good father, a good man. You'd want him working for you. And yet, it's easy to draw a line straight from the SEC/DOJ employment process to the 2008 financial crisis. 


[Editor's note: "The grand total of prison sentences that resulted from a decade of S.E.C. referrals was 87... By 2002, only about one thousand white-collar criminals were in federal prison, less than 1 percent of the total federal prison population." -- from The Number (2004 paperback) by Alex Berenson, pp. 145.] 

Another friend was the opposite of the one I just mentioned. His mother left him when he was young, but his father worked hard and eventually became successful. By the time the friend was in his 20s, he'd passed the bar exam but committed an ethical violation that caused his license to be suspended. He was possibly an alcoholic as well. Around 2008-2009, when housing prices collapsed in America, his family helped him buy a home below market price. And just like that, he became affluent. He even managed to reclaim his license to practice law after attending counseling. 

But this friend isn't someone you'd want your son to emulate. He had little interest in raising his children when they were under 4 years old, and he married an immigrant dependent on him. At one point, when his wife said something he didn't like, he left abruptly without saying where he was going, leaving her with two young children. Before he returned, she called the writer, distraught, asking the whereabouts of her husband. Note that we are discussing one of the most successful middle managers in a large, well-known software company. I won't even get into the American president's administration at the time, which included Rob PorterSo whether you analyze the private or public sectors, nothing was working very well. Both seemed to promote incompetence or indifference. 

Even nonprofitsunions, and religious institutions were failing. The Catholic Church in America paid billions in settlements after deliberately covering up child abuse and pedophilia. Child abuse! 
From 6/2019's The Atlantic, by James Carroll
Any other entity would have been forced to close down, but Western governments had shifted so many social service responsibilities to religious entities, they could not reverse themselves, causing a loss of regulatory and moral credibility. But what do you expect from a consumer-driven, military-oriented country professing to follow a prophet who never led or joined an army, was a pacifist, and wasn't materialistic? 
H3: I'm starting to understand what you mean when you say, "Everyone was in on it," but surely there were success stories. 

H4: Of course there were, but it wasn't common. When someone managed to do well without an obvious assist, the media lionized that person, using outliers to create and market the image that a certain place was unique in its ability to elevate the poor into riches. 

H3: We learned about this. By 2018, America had become a society of entrenched wealth, with little intergenerational mobility. Bill Gates' father was a successful lawyer. Warren Buffett's father was a 4-term U.S. Representative. Charlie Munger's grandfather was a federal judge. Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk, once said, "We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn't even close our safe." 

But it wasn't just billionaires. In 1992, economists Daphne Greenwood and Edward Wolff "estimated that 50 to 70% of the wealth of households under age 50 was inherited." 
From Kwame Appiah's The Lies that Bind (2018):
"In China, too, wealth and status is 80% determined... by the wealth and status of your parents."
Other prominent economists, Lawrence Summers and Laurence Kotlikoff, "using a variety of simulation techniques, estimated that as much as 80% of personal wealth came from direct inheritance or the income on inherited wealth." (See Doug Henwood, Wall Street (1998), pp. 69) 
Galloway's The Four (2017)
H4: What Americans hadn't understood, in addition to interest rates and inflation, was that democracy in an age of television renders marketing agents more powerful than politicians, educators, and logic itself. Whoever is in power becomes dependent on marketing to maintain legitimacy. 

H3: "Image is everything."

H4: Exactly. Now do you see why politicians were blaming Facebook and Russia in 2018 instead of trying to reform fundamental issues? As long as the problem is elsewhere, they don't look like fools being led to irrelevance. 


At the same time, we should remember marketing drove much of America's consumer economy, so image really did matter. If I can buy virtually the same shoe, the same t-shirt, etc., from a Chinese or Japanese company online and pay less, why would I buy an American-made product? Fortunately, by 2018, most consumers had caught on to the marketing machine. In other words, it wasn't just fake news that repelled them--everything marketed falsely turned them off.

Smaller companies started to look more attractive by manufacturing less. Thus, self-imposed economic scarcity with higher personalization became the norm, sometimes even with excellent customer service. Consumers realized they could "signal" an image without major corporations, and small businesses realized they couldn't compete with larger corporations' ability to scale, so you had an economy that forked but became even more dependent on image. 


H3: That doesn't seem optimal, especially if one's economy is consumer-driven.  

H4: True. America faced having to create an entirely new business model, but how could it create a new economy when debt still drove every avenue? Technology companies were ahead of the curve--for decades, they had produced the majority of their revenue from overseas. By 2018, small businesses worldwide finally caught on and started using technological advances to also sell and invest overseas. The trillion dollar economic question became, "Which platforms would succeed? Amazon? Alibaba? Etsy? Aliexpress.com?" 

H3: So the platform became the most important economic weapon? 

H4: Yes. It's interesting you use the term, "weapon," because shipping still had to be effectuated properly, which required global cooperation. If a small or large business couldn't deliver its products efficiently, or if a single customs agent was incompetent, a business would decline even if it succeeded in being noticed online. Amazon predicted this development and began its own shipping business. For truly global trade to occur, shipping and logistics became key drivers. 

As shipping became more efficient, people started questioning the global economic system's overseers and rule-makers. Why shouldn't Albanian mountain water or Georgian mineral water be able to compete on the same level playing field as water from Fiji or Iceland? Why should a few trade negotiators and presidents make it easier for one product to enter a country over another? Why shouldn't consumers in America, Cuba, and China have unfettered access to Iranian saffron and Persian pistachios? 

H3: You're suggesting something radical. At the time, the basis for trade agreements and free trade zones--and their lower and preferential tariffs--was military and security cooperation as well as mutually beneficial weapons purchases. Trade was weaponized as a way to force weaker countries not part of a particular framework to adapt or come to the table and negotiate. 

H4: Yes, but why? Why should the global economy be weaponized and based on military spending? 

H3: Because if Country A had fewer security safeguards, its ability to ship containers to Country B increases risks for Country B's citizens. Human trafficking, weapons sales... 

H4: But human trafficking and weapons sales were happening regardless of trade agreements and tariffs. The mafia would pay off the right people, squeeze others, and co-opt whatever security apparatus was in place. 
Wherever human beings exist, so does the potential for corruption. Isn't that why fully automated systems captured the public's imagination in 2017? If you could remove human beings from the equation, you could increase safety and time. The tradeoffs would be less independence, less individuality, and less personalization--but if it worked for self-driving cars, why not shipping containers? After all, "90% of the world's commercial traffic is transported in containers on the high seas." (McMafia (2008), pp. 339) 

Unfortunately, Americans underestimated the level of institutional corruption. Few people part of the security or global trade apparatus supported legalization of drugs or smoother legal immigration because as long as a mafia or enemy existed, law enforcement and military spending could increase or at least be maintained. On the federal/national level, military spending at some point provided 13.4% of jobs for American men. On the local/city level, at least 50%--and often 70+%--of the budget went to public safety aka police and firefighters. In some cities, even primary school crossing guards were being hired through the city's police budget.

So let's pretend humans in 2019 awoke to a world of peace and fully automated trade systems. How could their governments provide jobs and the taxes that produced the cash flow to maintain trillions of dollars of outstanding debt? How could the military and banking institutions, which had contributed so much to progress from 1945 to 2001, get their due? 

H3: But by 2018, drones and other technological innovations meant fewer soldiers were needed, and the Western-debt-fueled model was unsustainable. 

H4: So what? Don't you remember? Everyone was in on it. Image was everything. So how do you sustain such a model? You make sure everyone gets paid. 

Consider something as simple as tobacco sales. Everyone knows tobacco is terrible for you. Your body rejects it immediately the first time you try it. But if you create a system where everyone from the local pharmacy to the local teacher to the national government gets paid--through sales taxes or direct sale revenue--then why would anyone be against tobacco? To be against tobacco, you'd have to replace the revenue on multiple levels with something else. That "something else" might be unpredictable. 

[Editor's note: "In 1912, the [American] government derived 45% of its revenue from duties imposed on imported goods, and another 42% from excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco. There was no income tax. So tariffs and these two excise taxes accounted for 87% of government receipts. They were a kind of national sales tax, though no one called them that." -- Donald Bartlett & James Steele, The Great American Tax Dodge (2000), hardcover, pp. 6.] 

H3: "The devil you know is better than the devil you don't"? 

H4: Exactly. There's no conspiracy, no evil intent. But slowly everyone buys into an interlinked web of revenue, and once debt gets added in... 

H3: The debt must be paid. Now I understand political pundit James Carville: “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”

H4: Ha! You know something else? By 2018, Muslims already had the solution for over 1,000 years, or at least a mitigation strategy: a partnership investment model rather than a debt-via-slavery one. The followers of Muhammad (PBUH), many of them business-savvy, must have heard of Christian Jubilee(s) and innovated. Without realizing it, they invented the modern venture capital model, later perfected by Silicon Valley's Tom Perkins. 

H3: So the Americans, they figured out the Muslims had the right idea and adapted?

H4: [Sigh.] No. They and their allies killed or tortured as many Muslims as they possibly could. Also, their President actively sought to ban them from entering the country. (See Executive Order 13769.) 


H3: The courts went along with it?

H4: What do I keep telling you? Everyone was in on it. You think judges in Nazi Germany didn't go along with political leadership? (
Jörg Friedrich: "Perhaps there is truly evidence that a constitutional state can stand on a judicial mass grave.") It's the same everywhere, in every time period.

[Editor's Note (February 15, 2018): the day after this post was published, a U.S. Court of Appeals voted 9-4 against revised Executive Order 13769. From Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory

On a human level, the Proclamation’s invisible yet impenetrable barrier denies the possibility of a complete, intact family to tens of thousands of Americans. On an economic level, the Proclamation inhibits the normal flow of information, ideas, resources, and talent between the Designated [Muslim-majority] Countries and our schools, hospitals, and businesses. On a fundamental level, the Proclamation second-guesses our nation’s dedication to religious freedom and tolerance. "The basic purpose of the religion clause of the First Amendment is to promote and assure the fullest possible scope of religious liberty and tolerance for all and to nurture the conditions which secure the best hope of attainment of that end." Schempp, 374 U.S. at 305 (Goldberg, J., concurring). When we compromise our values as to some, we shake the foundation as to all. More here.] 

[Editor's Note (July 1, 2018): In the end, everyone really was in on it. On June 26, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the travel ban in Trump vs. Hawaii (2018). Justice Sotomayor's and Justice Breyer's dissents are so obviously correct, and Justice Robert's opinion so obviously circular, the decision represents the last nail in the coffin for American cultural leadership. Every woman and Jew voted against the majority opinion; every Christian man voted in favor. Only one minority, an African-American man who attended private, white-majority Catholic high school and college, voted with the majority.] 

Here's another quote you might like: "It seems that mankind is too stupid and too greedy to save himself." It was repeated verbatim by Stephen Hawking decades later. I'm no physicist, but inertia is the most powerful force I've studied, especially when the human ego is involved. 

H3: This is getting depressing. It couldn't possibly have been that bad, because otherwise, we wouldn't be here discussing our ancestors, right?

H4: Progress doesn't require happiness. A machine can continue regardless of its emotional state, and the American economy was very much like a machine, with workers in debt having no choice but to be optimistic.

H3: I don't agree with you. I've studied the humans, too, and they produced wonderful art and were capable of great acts of charity. I'll give you a quote now, from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice."

H4: Dr. King didn't invent that quote, but I like his other ones better:  


"A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor--both black and white--through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such... I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today--my own government...

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered... A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Those words were spoken April 4, 1967--exactly one year before his assassination. If you're an optimist, would you say America heeded Dr. King's words from 1967 to 2018? 


H3: Again, if our human ancestors failed, if they were so stupid, why are you and I here? 

H4: There are several possible answers to your question. You can go with W.E.B. Dubois's "Talented Tenth," you can claim humanity's perseverance greatly exceeded its compassion and intelligence... 

H3: Why not just look at Kazuo Ishiguro's life? If most of our ancestors were stupid and greedy, how could they recognize and elevate a man like him? Surely you're being selective in your examples. 

H4: I don't think I'm being selective in my examples. Didn't I say earlier that human beings used outliers to market and promote certain images? 

H3: But it's not just him, a Japanese-born Brit. Look at Erica Wiebe, a proud Canadian with a German last name. Or Pakistani-American Shahid Khan. How can you look at these individuals and say the entire system was corrupt and everyone was in on it?

H4:  I admit I was being overly general, but are you arguing we should focus on outliers in evaluating a culture? 
Melbourne, Australia (2016)
H3: Not at all, but certainly we must account for them. Perhaps we should continue this conversation later, when we can achieve an understanding that includes the full panoply of humanity, its successes as well as its failures. 

H4: As you wish

[Part 3 is HERE.]

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Historians in 2255: the Simulacrum Society vs. the Savages

It is now 2255. Two historians review the recent past

Historian 1 and Historian 2 have been trying to understand why the United States of America began its downward spiral in 2016. At first, when told about the country and its military spending, advanced technology, and two oceans to protect it, along with some of the smartest people in the world, they struggled to understand its collapse in 2166. 


2166 was the year of America’s Second Civil War, when nationwide militias banded together, refused the central government’s demands to give up their weapons, and went on the offensive. Many Americans tried fleeing to Utah, but people in Utah had been preparing for such an event for decades and refused entry (but not assistance) to most internal refugees.  By chance, Canada had built a wall several years ago, which now prevented Americans from fleeing north. After the militias were put down, the United States of America existed in name only. The country continued its core strength of security products—no other place protected and transported physical items so well—but there was nothing united about a country where cities and states revolving around academia competed each year with cities and states revolving around military culture, with both factions trying to increase funding each year at the expense of the other. 

H1: I really don’t get it. On the surface, all the data in the year 2000 indicated the United States would continue to dominate for centuries. 


H2: I thought the same as you, but once I did a deep dive, I realized America’s strengths were also its greatest weaknesses. At the same time greater clarity of direction was needed in a fragmented world, America’s checks and balances began working against it. Nothing could get done, and all change became necessarily incremental. 

H1: What’s the problem with incremental change

H2: In ordinary times, nothing. One of America's problems was that it had already borrowed money from future generations to pay off senior citizens--or, more accurately, entities serving senior citizens--in ways that distorted federal, state, and local budgets. Today, we’re all under some centralized government—well, most of us are, while others prefer to live more simple lives—but back then, America had to deal with political factions on three different levels. It’s a great system to prevent centralization of power, but Americans didn’t realize that increasingly dangerous cyber-threats plus a reduction in the efficacy of its naval power meant its system of government was less effective than competitors. 

H1: Ok, so America’s engine of progress would have slowed down a bit. That’s the price you pay for checks and balances, isn’t it? 

H2: Sure, but what good are checks and balances if the politicians before you 1) made promises based on artificial financial engineering; and 2) used debt to give their constituents everything they wanted, but in unsustainable ways? 

H1: We’ve solved these problems today with everyone guaranteed a basic standard of living, so why was money such an issue back then? 

H2: Today we’ve realized there’s no point in an economic system that prioritizes labor arbitrage (i.e., currency manipulations, outsourcing, insourcing) when robots can do most of the work for us. Back then, humans were stuck in a winner-take-all system because of technological threats making it harder for small businesses to grow without debt or costly third-party assistance, and also complex cross-border regulations preventing small and even mid-sized businesses from becoming truly global. How do you compete with larger, established players when your website can be subjected to a DNS attack, or when you need import-export permits and connections to make sure your goods aren’t “lost” along the way to the customer? 

H1: Wait, didn’t Amazon offer excellent tech services at a low cost to everyone, including small businesses? 

H2: Yes, and in doing so, it increased its own dominance because it had software to analyze the data coming from those third-party accounts. In effect, America’s technological leaders used data and AI to further distance themselves from their smaller competitors--when they weren't buying out or copying them. 

Think of it this way: today, we see no point in maintaining separate armies in each independent country or community. We realized the costs—both financial and otherwise—for smaller, developing countries to match the technological aptitude of larger countries were prohibitive and counter-productive to world peace. We also realized any war between advanced countries or their proxies would be potentially catastrophic—and by catastrophic, I mean world-ending—not only to residents in each country, but to everyone else. 

Once we agreed the usual models wouldn’t work because human decision-making wasn’t yet developed enough to predict or even prevent human error—the 2018 Hawaii false missile alarm being one example—the only solution was increasing cooperation between all nuclear powers and satellite owners. I’m not saying countries still don’t try to disrupt other countries, but we mostly agree that using resources that could improve residents’ domestic conditions is preferred to an arms race with no end and mutually assured global destruction

Developed nations did try to encourage less developed countries to boost infrastructure, but imposing the same regulations of a developed country on a developing country soon proved counterproductive. I read somewhere that a traveler passing through a developing country’s airport had a much easier process than a traveler to a so-called advanced country, which tells you technology wasn’t working the way humans intended. There was even a story where humans replaced retail workers with machines, but there were so many inefficiencies in the software, the human worker experienced more drudgery, obviating the tech’s utility. Initially, developed countries relied on labor arbitrage to fix these gaps, but soon it became obvious having separate systems in each country that weren’t at least minimally compatible with each other made no sense. 

H1: I understand what you’re saying, but even today, we have tech issues. I’d like to think we won’t collapse just because we have technological issues. 

H2: Yes, but because we can manipulate our DNA, we don’t have similar social problems. If you want to be a different skin color, a different body type, etc., you can accomplish that—as long as you consent to 24/7 neurological surveillance so researchers can gather biological data that helps improve our systems. 

In 2016, unlike now, artificial differences separated humans, who put up artificial barriers to protect themselves. Almost every so-called legal advancement served only to increase segregation and inequality, which led to social strife. 
July 1979, National Geographic
As lawyers were busy discovering new ways to segregate their clients’ interests from political unpredictability, people post-Snowden realized they had unwittingly sacrificed privacy for little to no increase in efficiency or security. Governments tried to recapture credibility by becoming more transparent and encouraging open debates, but in an age where knowledge and the ability to absorb it logically was highly dependent on multiple factors outside an individual's control, these attempts backfired. 

In short, Western governments in the 21st century found themselves outmaneuvered by the more nimble private sector, hamstrung by union and other rules prioritizing politics over customer service and merit, and generally at a loss on how to deal with the vestiges of prior administrations, which had made promises based on economic assumptions no longer necessarily true. Would China continue to buy debt denominated in U.S. dollars? Would the U.S. consumer accept a free trade paradigm where a strong dollar improved their quality of life while shifting production to other countries? How would “most-favored nation” status work fluidly in an age of multiple superpowers, each possessing proprietary technology and particular special interests? 

H1: [chuckles] Ok, you’re getting too wonky for me. So the old ways weren’t working for everyone. Why didn’t the leaders change things? 

H2: If only it were that easy. Remember we said all political change was incremental? Once you include massive, multi-generational debt into the equation, change becomes even more tricky. In the United States, the majority of the federal budget was on autopilot after 2001. Its government kept funding operations, including foreign overreach, through a legal maneuver called appropriations, which had been designed only for short-term use. 

Lacking fiscal discipline, even basic changes such as legalization of drugs and reducing the ROI on long-term obligations couldn’t be done uniformly, much less internationally. For example, why would a country like Singapore, which could actually control drug imports due to its small size, sign up for drug liberalization? In Singapore's case, the cost-benefit analysis fell firmly on the side of drug enforcement, whereas in America, police were outmanned and often outgunned against drug enterprises, starting as early as Miami in the 1980s. 

[Editor's note: America's comparatively strong dollar and its failure to eliminate cartels meant that civic institutions--and therefore progress and opportunities for arm's length collaboration--south of the border were hamstrung. For instance, how could any Mexican police department, even if funded properly, attract ambitious employees when it faced a stronger currency next door and less employment flexibility (i.e., no "access to cheap skilled labour and a strictly anti-competitive use of lethal violence"), especially if cartels functioned as de facto welfare and jobs agents in local communities? Also, in the absence of competent local police, why wouldn't the logical progression be a military-industrial complex? From Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security: "You almost had a shadow government that controlled huge amounts of economic activity in a totally unaccountable way." (Inside the American Mob, S1:E1, 2013)] 

H1: Why do you focus on drugs? Today, we can get any drug we like, and scientists are working on even better ones. 

H2: You have to remember that our economic system today is different from the ones around Earth in 2018. Today, when we are born, we all receive a pre-set allocation of BlockCoins that can last us our entire lives if we are reasonably careful. Different pods and different countries have rules on how we can spend these BlockCoins, but they are universally transferable, though prices are different depending on one’s location. Most countries provide a staggered number of BlockCoins until the age of 40 (the age limit increases as more anti-aging advances are discovered) to promote prudent spending. If someone runs out of BlockCoins today, they will most likely relocate to a less expensive pod or country or even go “savage” and move to a non-technologically advanced pod. As we know, under this economic system, women gained much more political power and wealth, and now dominate most high-level non-military governance positions. 

H1: I dislike the savage pods. They receive our protection and some  of our medical advances without contributing biological data. Some of them come around when a child gets sick, and even I felt sorry for the savage who received CRISPR treatment for his son in exchange for a lens implant that unwittingly allowed a BlockCoin billionaire to secretly spy on sector B6. 

H2: [Cocks one eyebrow] Interesting. Well, humans in the 21st century worked all their lives to gain enough wealth so they could finally pursue their passions and dreams in old age; in contrast, we go to school to learn what most interests us and then receive training to help us choose occupations based on our specific abilities and desires. 

Personally, I'm surprised earlier humans agreed to have their data mined without compensation while paying for medical care, education, housing, and so on. Many people even went in debt for such essential items. 

The reason we're able to enjoy such a high quality of life today is because we voluntarily provide constant, real-time biological data to the pods and central research unit. Most of us accept the tradeoff between a lack of privacy and the goal of a perfect singularity, i.e., a human being with at least the same level of abilities as the most advanced machines. Data is anonymized before being sent to the pods and central research unit, but you and I are able to access results and CRISPR suggestions based on individualized data. Rogue actors pose no threat because central military command can freeze and/or obliterate any specific area immediately with the unanimous consent of the revolving 7-member Security Council, chosen every three years based on the countries producing the most innovative breakthroughs in science, music, math, and engineering. Members with conflicts of interest must abstain from voting, but generally speaking, since everyone is born with the same number of BlockCoins, persons in all countries are somewhat valuable to other countries, so cross-border violence and aggression are counterproductive. 

Sadly, our ancestors created a suboptimal system in which they delayed their passions and dreams until old age. 

By Stephan Pastis (12/5/17); notice of fair use provided to licensor June 20, 2019.
To assuage their neuroses, they engaged in terrorism, violence, illegal drugs, and other diversions we find anachronistic. Such improper behavior necessitated large budgetary outlays for police and military forces, obligations which grew larger every year. Funding such expansion required debt at levels that would never be paid off completely as well as non-financial complexity like infiltration and surveillance

For example, it was not uncommon for a police unit to pay undercover officers to infiltrate or surveil a gang dealing in drugs. In other words, while the police were infiltrating drug dealing gangs and sometimes even running drug operations themselves, they were spending money trying to stamp out the same operations, which were busy expanding into other areas of business, even going so far as stealing donations to nonprofit centers for online resale. Illegal drugs formed the core of the revenue that allowed crime to expand, which led citizens to authorize more funding for crime-fighting, which then allowed more surveillance, less overall privacy, more segregation, and so on and so forth. At some point, humans realized they needed to decriminalize drugs, fix immigration laws to mitigate human trafficking, and not waste funding on self-defeating strategies, but until that moment occurred, citizens bickered over a lack of funding for other areas even as most local tax revenue was going to public safety operations

H1: Violence, debt, crime, not being able to pursue one’s passions until old age…and you haven’t even mentioned disease and sickness yet! I don’t mean to be rude, but why did these people even bother? 

H2: Many of them didn’t. Suicide rates and depression were highest in the most developed countries. You despise the savages, but they mock us, too. When they’re not calling us a “Simulacrum Society,” they’re comparing us to the pods in The Matrix (1999). 

H1: I’ve heard those criticisms before, and they’re evidence of the savages’ lesser developed tastes and intellect. In The Matrix, the machines were using us, but we are using the machines. 

H2: Are you sure about that? If the machines took over, wouldn’t they be advanced enough to use neuro-data sets and AR/VR technology to make us think we were still in charge? Anyway, to answer your original question, why did humans endure under such counterproductive systems? A review of literature would lead you to the answer of love. No matter how low or damaged someone was, it was normal to persist in the belief that someone, somewhere loved him or her or would love him or her. 

H1: Ah, so gender relations were optimal then? 

H2: [Sighs] Actually, in America, they were quite low in 2018. 

H1: Surely you’re joking. 

H2: Humanity many centuries ago recognized that men and women comprised two sides of the same puzzle that needed union for happiness, but in practice, men and women could rarely get along unless the male met a female when he was starting out or not successful, and the female stayed with him even when she could have chosen someone more successful. The best case scenario was stated most aptly by comedian Chris Rock: “You can be married and bored, or single and lonely!” 

H1: I’m not going to say we’ve solved gender issues, but at least it’s much easier to keep occupied and motivated without a significant biological other. Very few humans today think love is the central goal anymore. We live too long, and it’s not difficult to find people who accept short-term relationships. 

H2: But that’s exactly why the savages mock us. They say we’ve discovered every innovation except the most important ones. Do you remember their last line in the most recent debate? “Give me a life difficult enough to value the important things, enough time to find them, and enough life to enjoy them—no more, no less.” They say the difficulty is the point. In the struggle is my salvation, and so on and so forth. 

H1: They have all kinds of ideas. One of them argued that although we can better analyze specific DNA sequences or identify harmful strands, we still don’t know the total impact of modifying one DNA sequence on all the other sequences ad infinitum. But of course the researchers have accounted for this issue and use AI to run simulations on all possible outcomes. 
H2: I think the argument was that AI only knows what data it receives under a specific rule set, so if a human being programs the AI with data only known up to x date, what if the human being is unintentionally eliminating mutations not in the data as of x date? 

H1: Once again, the researchers account for these possibilities by running all possible sequences. 

H2: But how can AI know what it doesn’t know? Are we correct in assuming biology follows very specific rules like chess or that the simulations can account for all possible mutations? 

H1: [Cocks eyebrow] Are you getting wonky on me again? 

H2: Fine. Back to relationships. The correct answer is, “I don’t know.” Some couples worked out, some didn’t. Our lives are far more predictable than theirs, but we are less likely to engage in permanent relationships or reproduce naturally. 
"Pat" Boone, one of America's most famous personalities, in a magazine from 1957.
I remember reading an author discuss his time watching couples on the London Underground. He said he didn’t know what love was, but he could always see it when it was there. According to him, love wasn’t at all abstract—it was literally there in the quickness and shape of a smile and the subtle ways happy couples subconsciously mimicked each other’s body movements. Once he realized he could see love, that’s what he aimed to achieve, but right after he set the goal, he realized his silliness. He could not accomplish such a goal on his own, and he could not predict when or if it would happen. There was probably an equal chance in his life of never finding love as seeing it. 

Yet, realizing he could see love, that it wasn’t entirely abstract, encouraged him to spend more time on people and to try to see why they behaved the way they did. Why was that woman wearing that brand, that color? Did she believe it helped present a better version of herself, and she wished to attract a specific someone? Or had she saved up for months to get an item so she’d have an easier time being spoken to with respect? What did she intend to convey by choosing this color, this dress, over another?

H1: Perhaps it was the only clean laundry that day. One never knows with the savages. 


H2: Maybe that’s the point. 

[Part II is here.] 

© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2018)