The Convivial Society: Vol. 1, No. 4

Viral Fears

“That means that when I think that a disaster threatens and that developments threaten to lead to a destiny for mankind, as I wrote concerning the development of technology, I, as a member of mankind, must resist and must refuse to accept that destiny … At such a moment, you must continue to cherish hope, but not the hope that you will achieve a quick victory and even less the hope that we face an easy struggle. We must be convinced that we will carry on fulfilling our role as people … This struggle against the destiny of technology has been undertaken by us by means of small scale actions. We must continue with small groups of people who know one another. It will not be any big mass of people or any big unions or big political parties who will manage to stop this development … But we must continue to hope that mankind will not die out and will go on passing on truths from generation to generation.”

— Jacques Ellul, The Betrayal by Technology, a Portrait of Jacques Ellul

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I’m writing this late on Friday night. The same time of day when, in mid-January, I began delving into the coronavirus hashtags on Twitter. You may remember a passing mention of this in the newsletter on conspiracy theorizing late last month. This was, needless to say, not altogether in my best interest.

I’m not sure how best to describe the experience, although I suspect more than a few of you already know firsthand what I’m talking about. I repeatedly thought to myself that if you could somehow distill the essence of a Hieronymus Bosch painting into a Twitter feed, what you would get would be coronavirus twitter in those early weeks. Alternatively, I also thought this might be what it would’ve been like if Twitter were around at the turn of the first millennium as segments of society were consumed by a millenarian frenzy. It was a surreal and disconcerting mix of fear, angst, panic, wild speculations, dubious videos, unverifiable claims, all sprinkled with bizarre religious claims and pronouncements.

I’d like to tell you that I calmly deployed my critical thinking and media literacy skills in order to discern fact from opinion and truth from fiction. In reality, I found that my ability to do any such thing was being undermined; to be in that environment without readily being able to locate any epistemic grips was unnerving. Ultimately, I chose simply to stop looking. That’s what I should’ve done all along, you’re probably thinking. Well, it’s complicated. There were, then, two alternatives. Stop looking into unfiltered coronavirus twitter and turn to “credible sources” instead, or simply ignore the situation and stop paying attention altogether. I ended up doing something like the former, but with a measure of uneasiness and nothing like complete confidence in what I was reading.

As it turned out, many of those credible sources were urging what now seems like precisely the wrong response in the face of a growing crisis (some, in my view, are persisting in this vein). Meanwhile, I kept noticing that not a few of the more sober and responsible voices I followed on Twitter, while not exactly experts and “credible authorities” on infectious diseases, were also expressing, reservedly, their unease and nervousness. I suspect they, too, were looking beyond the official channels. And many of them knew, too, that in these cases our institutions have demonstrated a bias against causing undue alarm with a less than stellar track record to show for it.

I began quietly adding some non-perishable food items to my grocery shopping two weeks ago, unsure if I was being sensible or paranoid. In retrospect, it would seem that I was being sensible, I think I’m in a better position now precisely because I did not heed what appeared to be the majority opinion among the usual slew of reliable outlets. I managed somehow to arrive then at more or less the advice now finally being given from many quarters: take this seriously, prepare not for the end of the world but for the possibility that everyday life will be significantly disrupted for an indefinite period of time … and wash your hands obsessively.

I report all of this not to congratulate myself—frankly, there’s a good chance more than a few of you might still be thinking that I was/am closer to paranoia than sensibility—but rather to stress just how unsettling the whole affair has been. Unsettling not only because we are still not altogether clear on the scope and scale of the crisis we are almost certainly facing, but because the experience of the epistemic conditions created by digital media became more of a felt reality than a matter of detached analysis. The path down the rabbit hole is, I’m here to report, greased, and it takes absolutely minimal effort to find oneself on the edge, inadvertently slipping in.

It is true that this case has been something of a perfect storm for just such a state of affairs: an encounter with a novel, deadly phenomenon, emerging within a less than transparent social milieu. That could have described any number of previous moments in human history, of course. The difference is that digital media has added another critical dimension: digital patterns of communication accelerated, augmented, diffused, refracted the experience of crisis. Digital virality compounded the consequences of biological virality. Problems endemic to our information ecosystem have exacerbated the risks posed by a novel viral threat.

It is true, however, that as we gain a better understanding of the disease over time, it seems the acute nature of the specifically epistemic crisis wanes. And it does appear that this is beginning to happen, although there is still much that is contested and uncertain.

Unfortunately, this moment of pronounced anxiety was just one case of a more pervasive problem: we are increasingly moving into territory for which we have no map, and our use of digital media amounts to pushing hard on the accelerator rather than covering the break.

Moreover, it is not, as Adam Elkus has pointed out, that we are living in a post-truth society, it is that we are living in a post-trust society. Trust has always been a critical component of our apprehension of the truth. The question was not whether trust was required of us, the question was whether enough of us could hold our trust in common, that is trust common sources of knowledge and truth. In the age of mass media and of the expert, our institutions commanded widespread trust. Today, that is hardly the case. Trust has been splintered, and society with it. We are too aware of the failure of institutions and we’ve been disabused of the notion that they might arrive at some disinterested, neutral account of things as the basis for collective action

Zeynep Tufekci, who has been one of the more sane voices throughout all of this, observed recently that the “opposite of needless panic isn't downplaying of real threats.” Indeed. That seems like an eminently reasonable conclusion, but somehow we seem to find it incredibly difficult to find that mean. To speak this way—of finding the mean between two vices—is to speak in the language of the virtues, particularly in its Aristotelian dialect. As Aristotle would put it, courage is neither cowardice or recklessness. So, what is the mean between panic and disregard of real threats. The virtue in question seems to involve an intellectual element. It suggests a stance toward what we do and do not know that involves a measure of humility, composure, and resoluteness.

Whatever that virtue is, we’ll need it.

In the meantime, here is a useful piece by Tufekci on how we might prepare for the arrival of the coronavirus, presuming you are reading this in an area where the time for preparation is not already past.

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News and Resources​

• “Trust in Automation: A literature review”: “This report reviews literature pertaining to trust in automated systems to provide an integrated summary of the major theoretical and empirical work in the field to date.”
  

• “An app can be a home-cooked meal”: Thoughtful reflection by Robin Sloan on building an app that will only be used by four people and a philosophy of coding that has nothing to do with market value. I confess, I don’t code, but, in the words of King Agrippa, “Almost thou persuadest me, Robin.”
  

• “We All Wear Tinfoil Hats Now”: A review of The Technical Delusion, a book which

  “… explores what it means that what were once regarded as bizarre delusions have become difficult to distinguish from mainstream assumptions. The book tracks the emergence and spread of what he refers to as the ‘technical delusion’ — a term that may encompass any and all delusions about technology, but usually designates a belief in machines that can control, surveil, harass, and deceive humans.”

• Deepfake deployed in Indian political ads: “When the Delhi BJP IT Cell partnered with political communications firm The Ideaz Factory to create ‘positive campaigns’ using deepfakes to reach different linguistic voter bases, it marked the debut of deepfakes in election campaigns in India. ‘Deepfake technology has helped us scale campaign efforts like never before,’ Neelkant Bakshi, co-incharge of social media and IT for BJP Delhi, tells VICE. ‘The Haryanvi videos let us convincingly approach the target audience even if the candidate didn’t speak the language of the voter.’”
  

• In a short essay for The Hedgehog Review, Richard Hughes Gibson draws fruitful parallels between the doctrine of purgatory and the ideas and practices of the trans/posthumanist crowd. A snippet: “Arriving at the Singularity is the promised reward for committing one’s self to years—perhaps decades—of model behavior and ritual cleansing.” For some time now, I’ve been in the habit of referring to trans/posthumanism as “(post-)Christian fan fiction,” so, naturally, this piece resonated.
  

• Meet the new boss … worse than the old boss. Automation may or may not one day displace large segments of the working class, but it is already managing them. The results are what you would expect:

  “These automated systems can detect inefficiencies that a human manager never would — a moment’s downtime between calls, a habit of lingering at the coffee machine after finishing a task, a new route that, if all goes perfectly, could get a few more packages delivered in a day. But for workers, what look like inefficiencies to an algorithm were their last reserves of respite and autonomy, and as these little breaks and minor freedoms get optimized out, their jobs are becoming more intense, stressful, and dangerous. Over the last several months, I’ve spoken with more than 20 workers in six countries. For many of them, their greatest fear isn’t that robots might come for their jobs: it’s that robots have already become their boss.”

• Earlier this week, I caught an article on what we can learn from the Amish about technology, but, instead of passing that article along (it was fine), I’m going to pass along mine from a few years back: “The Tech-Savvy Amish.”
  

• Two scholars seek to recreate the sound of a 13th-century choir in the Hagia Sophia.
  

• “Beneath the Night”: The first of five 14-minute audio essay by the astronomer Stuart Clark the human relationship to the night sky.
  

• Philosopher David Cooper reviews three recent books on dogs: “The joyousness of dogs, or at any rate their great affability, must have been a significant factor in their induction into human communities. The usual utilitarian view that dogs were first put to practical uses – hunting, guarding, pulling – and only later became inserted into family life as pets is implausible. In several modern-day hunter-gatherer tribes, whose form of life is thought to resemble that of our Palaeolithic ancestors, dogs are companions first and workers second.”

  In a few days, I’ll pour out a little whiskey on what will be the fourth anniversary of the day I had to put down my then sixteen-year-old beagle.
  

• Last time around, I passed along a link to a story about Betelgeuse, the red giant that forms part of the constellation Orion, suggesting that its recently diminishing magnitude might suggest the star may explode in the near future. Here is a thread by an astronomer taking a much closer look at the data and suggesting more likely scenarios. I confess some of the technicalities of her discussion were beyond me, but I was heartened to learn that Orion would likely remain intact and we would not, amongst everything else, need to cope with astral figurations of impending doom. Although, it is interesting to meditate on the contrast between such pre-modern portents and the micro-drip of doom we self-administer on social media each day.

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Re-framings 

— From Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement Address, “A World Split Apart.” My thanks to Jake Meador for drawing my attention to this passage.

“Because instant and credible information has to be given, it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: ‘everyone is entitled to know everything.’ But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.”

I appreciate the idea of a right not to know. It is one way to practice the virtue of living within limits. Of course, what immediately comes to mind, and what complicates matters somewhat is the realization that the right to know and the right not to know, if it is to be oriented toward the good, must involve some determination about what one ought to know and what one has no obligation to know. The right either to know or not to know, in other words, needs to be paired with a corresponding responsibility grounded in a determination of the sort of knowledge that is necessary, useful, and edifying for us given our place in the world. Absent such judgments, we will likely find that we are unable to claim the right, and, meanwhile, the pressure will be to keep the gates of the mind perpetually open to every bit of information that presses in on it.

— From Wendell Berry’s “Health is Membership,” available in Art of the Commonplace:

“I am moreover a Luddite, in what I take to be the true and appropriate sense. I am not ‘against technology’ so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community. I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community. I believe that the community-in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures-is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.”

— From “The Responsibility of Mind In a Civilization of Machines” by Perry Miller, a prominent American historian of the last century. My thanks to Doug Hill for alerting me to this essay. Miller features prominently in Doug’s book, Not So Fast: Thinking Twice about Technology, which you all should definitely consider adding to your to-read lists.

“The essence of great tragedy, Eric Bentley says, is the realization by the self that it is totally unequipped to confront the universe. We might venture that even more tragic than any classical or Shakespearean drama is the crisis of illumination when man realizes, much too late for any last-minute panaceas, that he is unequal to the task of dealing with a universe of his own manufacture. ”

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The Conversation

Regarding my forthcoming essay in The New Atlantis, watch this space, as they say: “The Analog City and the Digital City: How online life breaks the old political order.”

Your thoughts on our present situation are always welcome via email to me directly or, for those of you generously paying for a subscription, in the comments.

A final word to Auden, the anniversary of who’s birth passed a few days ago on the 21st:

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Truly, be well and take care of yourself.

Best,

Michael