AN UNRULY COUPLE

March 5th, 2022

The fickle pair of power and influence has always been quite close. Those with the power have the influence. And to a large degree, this is and probably always will be the case, in some form or another. But is influence and power always perfectly correlated? Is it always the case that those with power have influence, and those with influence have the power?

 

Looking at the advent of recent social technologies, it’s arguable that influence and power have decoupled, somewhat. Those formerly without power or influence have gained some influence, which changes the way power operates. This can easily lead to a quagmire of semantics. Let’s define power as the practical elements: having control of money and force. And let’s define influence as an ability to guide, or alter mass opinion. Traditionally those with power had the money to shepard mass opinion by controlling the vehicles of information distribution. But free social platforms subvert that old structure, allowing those without power to gain influence, hence the horrible new term: influencer. What is an influencer? Someone with a lot of eyes and ears, but perhaps nothing else. The Kardashians, perhaps more than any other human entity, has demonstrated that it’s possible to bootstrap a flywheel, where generating influence can generate power (money) which can then be used to generate more influence. Tik tok stars who were known by no one but a few short months or years ago demonstrate that this bootstrap process is accelerating with the advent of social media.

 

Recent events show that quite a larger portion of the world can now listen to itself, unconfined by the gatekeeping of prior media, like television and print journalism. And when eyes and ears have new sources to stumble upon and ingest, influence becomes less centralized. But does power follow influence?

 

Perhaps in some places, but not in others. Power, unlike influence, is more grounded in physical systems, such as who actually has this and that money, and who dives orders to this and that set of professional armed people, such as militaries and police. The nature of these physical structures are far more rigid, and less susceptible to the wander and whim of influence. But while the two may not be fused twins, they certainly share an umbilical cord, and when one marches off in a direction with enough force, the other is likely to get yanked along. Unless of course it yanks back.

 

What’s important is to remember that the relationship between the two is never one to one. Those who think they have all the influence can be deluded into thinking they therefore have all the power. The compliment is also true. Those with all the power would be unwise to think they also have all the influence.

 

The important questions examine how these two act upon each other. Can either conclusively force the other? Authoritarian regimes go all-in on the answer being yes - for at least one direction: With all the power, influence can be forced. Is this always true? Hard to say, regime leaders eventually die, and then the details of the question become hazy: if a predecessor is not chosen, does it then fall to the one with the most influence? Even in regime’s that glorify power over influence, ignoring the latter can lead to an unravelling.

 

 

What’s also good to note is that the structure of influence is also rooted in certain physical structures.  The two most obvious examples of this are work and social media. These are the two places where attention is pooled most. Work dictates that attention should be spent in a certain way for a reward. Social media plugs attention into a novel phantasmagoria of current events, seemingly unburdened by the curating opinion of an editor or a news station producer.

 

It was an extremely lightweight set of software innovations that created this massive shift in attentional options. It’s impossible not to wonder: what other software innovations might create different organizations of attention, and ultimately, different avenues of influence? And even more important: when the avenues of influence change, does this create a different relationship between influence and power? Could there ever be an organization of influence that fundamentally changes the relationship between power and influence? These are all quite lofty questions, but it begs to wonder: we are gaining the ability to toggle with the genetic make up of our own culture, and fast track it’s evolution. And remember, evolution, no matter how fast or slow doesn’t mean it’s headed in a useful direction. Plenty of species evolved themselves out of existence.

 

Issues of both influence and power, ultimately boil down to a cultural question: is our global culture becoming more or less mindful of the long term situation?

TIME'S ASYMMETRY

March 4th, 2022

 

A child has almost no past. The abundance of the present is far bigger than feeble memory, and curiosity for details of now is all engrossing. But as we age, time stacks up behind us. The present grows smaller, compared to the train tail of memory we begin to lug around, growing ever longer as we go. And where is the future in all this? The future is an unknown, and nearly a non-entity. We interact with the future through our plans an expectations, which both grow smaller with age as milestones are passed and the room for a wide ranging set of plans narrow.

 

Imagine if, upon waking today, there was no memory of the past. Say you still knew all the normal things, like language, and human culture - but only generally. Image what would happen to your attention, and by extension, the experience of time? Attention modulates our experience of time. Perhaps time seems to move quicker as we grow older because it’s so easy to miss so much of the moment by being preoccupied with thoughts of past moments? Anyone waking up without a past would almost certainly have a long day with attention so tightly bound to each detail, trying to figure out what is going on.

 

Strangely people are apt to say life is short as they grow older, but with each and every second, life is longer than we’ve ever known. Children, who have so far had much shorter lives never comment on the fact, and it’s the oldest among us who comment on life’s brevity. Are the days actually shorter? Or do they simply seem different because they are compared to past days, that had a wholly different composition, packed with more events and changes, realizations and highs and lows?

 

It’s worth it to wonder how a child would experience this very moment. Not because a sense of wonder is enjoyable, but to ask why wonder occurs for a child in the first place? Adults gaze upon the moment with assumptions piled up from years of experience, and these assumptions not only blind us from new ways of looking at and experiencing the current moment but often prevent us from experiencing it at all as we simply repeat a phantasmagoria of thoughts, feelings and impressions composed during many yesterdays. A child’s wonder is quickly accomplishing it’s own undoing: wonder fuels inquisitive investigation, and once we come to our quick conclusions about this and that, they loose their mysterious gleam. The toy is quickly discarded and something new is sought out.

 

Boredom arises from a confidence that all of these assumptions are correct. Innovation arises when there’s plausible deniability - when there’s skepticism about current knowledge and an anti-assumption that perhaps there’s more to things than meets the eye: perhaps things can be different, but where do I find the overlooked detail, what does it mean, and how do I understand it?

 

Realizations are these abrupt shifts when all the world suddenly snaps to a new focus. It’s a pity they are so brief and take up such tiny slivers of time, allowing for the experience to be somewhat forgotten. Rarely do people anticipate future realizations. How many people are walking around with the thought that probably next week, they’ll think differently about things? Few seem to hold such a fluid view of their own selves - especially as we get older.

 

If there’s one principle about the future that we should glean from past perspectives, it’s that the future is likely to bring unexpected things - which should make unexpected things unsurprising. A surprise expected is not a surprise, even if you’re not sure what it’ll be, and yet everyone is continually surprised and shocked as events unfold. If anything, this perpetual failure to habituate to the unexpected is perhaps proof that our assumptions are chronically wrong to some very real degree. 

 

Perhaps there’s still a very real cause to invoke and practice a sense of wonder - not because it’s fun or childlike - but simply because the only thing we can be certain about is that our grasp of the world is wrong.

PRACTICING PARADISE

February 28th, 2022

Many religions and traditions have a vision of an idyllic afterlife. Calmness, relaxation, an end to suffering, a sense of true wellness - these are things to wait for and experience after life is over. It’s incentive for many people to grin and bear the toil and suffering and behave while here on earth. All the faith in the world can’t supply even the tiniest shred of evidence that such a paradisal afterlife actually exists, and so what’s to keep one from doubting that all the effort and work might be for nothing? There’s some clever arguments against this - that it’s a test of one’s faith, or that someone is somehow supposed to find the pain as the reward itself. But, to be honest, it’s just a shit deal, particularly because there’s a very sensible and practical alternative view that isn’t really at odds with the majority of belief systems.

 

It’s particularly odd because some religions advertise that such “divine” fruits can be experienced here on earth while we’re still alive. Jesus, for example, said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. Seems a bit strange to have to wait for the afterlife to experience it if we lug paradise around wherever we go, does it not?

 

Then of course there’s the offer from Buddhism that a lot of our suffering during the here and now is actually completely unnecessary and there’s a way to slough off this pesky aspect of existence.

 

So many people dream of floating in tropical waters, sitting on hot beaches, and yet, it’s perfectly possible to book that long-lusted-for vacation, go to that tropical beach, get in an unpleasant argument with a spouse and end up miserable on that beautiful beach.

 

Or simply move to that beach and slowly become inured to how lovely things are, and the same old anxieties and miseries will glide back into consciousness. The pleasantness of the tropical vacation is really in the novelty - just switching things up. So we fake paradise in the short term by using a different mechanism.

 

But there are mechanisms we can develop to unlock that paradise within each of us. It’s possible to be happy, calm and content for no reason at all, and every reason, be it good weather, or bad weather. It just requires practice. Paradise isn’t a place, or a time, it’s a state of mind, a shaping and maintenance of our very own consciousness that we can achieve here and now. Like all good things, it’s not achieved over night, and the flower for its fruit is slow to bloom - like physical fitness. A week at the gym will not create huge changes. But visiting the gym constantly, and consistently will yield results. Part of the practice of paradise is to cultivate a patience for its arrival.

 

Milton once wrote: The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. The practice of paradise is a mental training, and strangely we don’t talk about mental training all that much. We talk about training for a job, or physical training, but explicitly mental training is a rather esoteric topic, despite the fact that virtually everything we think and do is a mental training for the mind we will have tomorrow. Considering it’s absolute ubiquity for our very experience of life, you’d imagine a bit more.. discussion.

 

Unfortunately, few of the ancient religions and traditions talk about it either. Buddhism is really the only religion where a practical regimen of mental training can be divorced from the actual religion, and implemented to great effect on its own, independent of supernatural beliefs. This allows meditation to lend itself to the adherents of other religions inoffensively and it also fits in very well with the scientific and secular culture.

 

Through mental training, paradise is on offer to absolutely everyone, even those without the slightest shred of faith. 

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MISSING OUT

February 27th, 2022

 

The restaurant air was filled with laughter. Lucilius gasped for breath, and took the break in conversation to get up from the table for a minute. A last quip was slung his way and he snickered as the table erupted in laughter again. It was a perfect night, Lucilius thought as he walked away, celebrating his company’s success with true friends, reveling in the best that life had to offer. He paused at the bar to ask the bartender where the restroom was when a cold terror filled his body.

“Can I help you?” The barman asked.

 

Lucilius quickly ducked around a corner from the bar and peered back. The barman looked briefly side to side, feeling awkward, but it was past the barman Lucilius was looking. He studied the face of a man at the bar who was smiling, talking with a woman, the two leaning close to one another.

 

Lucilius rolled back against the wall, out of sight and closed his eyes. Was this a dream, he asked himself. But he could remember the details of the day clearly, the narrative pick-up from yesterday. He opened his eyes and checked details all around him, text on a notice board, the light of the room. He snuck a look back around the corner and a certain confused dread settled in. This was real.

 

When he tapped on the man’s shoulder, the woman gasped, and the man, turning and seeing Lucilius jolted, and then laughed.

 

“Geez, give a brother a little warning,” the man said before chuckling.

 

“I didn’t know you had a twin?” The woman said.

 

The doppelgänger before Lucilius looked a little uneasy. “Hey, can’t blame this guy for looking so good. Give me a second darling.”

 

Lucilius followed his own likeness into the back of the restaurant, through the kitchen and into the back alley.  He watched as the man shuffled a pack of cigarettes, lit one and offered to Lucilius. He just shook his head, still in shock about what he was seeing.

 

“Which one are you?”

 

“What?” Lucilius said.

 

His doppelgänger gave him a strange and strained look. “You look confused.”

 

“You could say that.”

 

“You mean to say you’ve never….” The doppelgänger motioned a hand between the two of them. “Seen one of us?”

“Not without a mirror.”

 

“Wow, well, ok.” The doppelgänger looked off into space for a moment and then chuckled.

 

“You know what’s going on? Are we twins?”

 

The guy laughed, “No, no, we’re not twins… well, not like that.” He looked at Lucilius with a mixture of pity and envy. “We’re clones.”

 

“What?”

 

“Yea….”

“That’s impossible, I have a family, parents.”

 

 

“No you don’t, your memory of them was placed there, your timeline -your life- picks up right after the second funeral, just like mine.”

 

The two were quiet for a moment as Lucilius thought about the possibility that this information could be a reality. HIs doppelgänger dragged his cigarette and watched thoughts click together  on Lucilius’ face.

 

“You’re telling me I’m five years old?”

The doppelgänger wagged his head a little. “Four and some months, but yea, pretty much.”

 

“How do you know about all this?”

“Same deal as you, another clone told me.”

“How many are there?”

 

“Oh, just a few, maybe half a dozen.”

“Who’s the original?”

 

The clone was taken aback, surprised. “You know, I’d never thought about the original.  Weird.”

 

Lucilius asked more questions, but the clone didn’t know too much more, only some details about the lives of the other clones he’d met, but from what Lucilius could tell, this clone hadn’t looked into the issue too much and had simply gone on living his life. He asked for the clone’s contact information, but the clone refused, saying it would probably be best if they just steered clear of one another, to try and just forget about it. The clone wouldn’t even tell Lucilius his name.

 

It took several months of research before Lucilius found another clone. Then another popped up. He travelled to meet with each, trying to find out where or what their origin was. One other clone had tried and failed to figure out where they had come from, getting too busy with getting on with life.

 

After nearly a year of searching, Lucilius found himself pressing a buzzer at the entrance of a run down apartment building. No one answered and it turned out the door was still slightly ajar. Lucilius pulled it open and walked down a flight of stairs to the basement units. The dim fluorescent light flickered, the exposed bulbs dark at their ends, the hastily cleaned remnants of a shattered one still embedded in the dirty carpet. Lucilius found the unit he was looking for and knocked on the door, and it moved, never fully closed. Lucilius pushed the door wider into the dark apartment, and he quietly stepped in.The dull drone of a TV wafted in from a different room. The place was a wreck of piled garbage, the smell of rotted food overpowered only by a stench of alcohol.

 

Bathed in the flicker and glow of the TV was another clone. Lucilius stood there, taking in the sad sight - a vision of himself, overweight and lost to an oblivion. A clutter of empty bottles around the couch, and a corresponding film below the lip, a moistened beard.

 

Lucilius nudged the man’s foot with his own. The man did not even stir. Lucilius sighed, and walked into another room, returning a few minutes later with a bucket of water, which he then dumped over the man, who instantly awoke, screaming through a blur of confusion and bleary eyes. When he finally settled and saw Lucilius before him, the man’s face grew sad, his neck growing limp till he was sobbing into his own hands, muttering disconnected words:

 

“…stop haunting me..”

 

Lucilius was confused, and suddenly felt remorse. It only occurred to him now the obvious truth: what terrible things must have happened to him - to anyone - to create the situation he now looked on.

 

Lucilius knelt and put a hand on the man’s shoulder.

 

“What do you mean, haunt?”

 

The man’s sobbing slowed, and when he finally looked at Lucilius it was with disdain.

 

“Do you know what it feels like to look at you?”

 

“What do you mean?” Lucilius asked.

 

The man laughed. “Do you envy me?” He said, spreading his flabby, bloated arms, motioning about the wrecked hovel. Lucilius looked around with him. “Imagine what it feels like to look at you, in your nice clothes, your perfect skin, fit as a freaking fiddle, and I bet you’ve built quite a nice life for yourself in the last few years. Imagine what it’s like to know you’re walking around - you and the others..”

 

“You are the original,” Lucilius stated, asking. But the man didn’t acknowledge, only looked off askance, holding in a torrent of emotion.

 

“What happened?” Lucilius asked. “We’re you tested on? Who did this?”

 

“Ha!” The man sneered. “I don’t know if that would add sting or lessen it…. No. The research was mine. All mine. I created all of you from scratch.”

 

“But what happened? Why don’t I remember anything, and how did you end up like this?”

 

The man sighed. “A clone is a perfect copy until the moment it starts to experience life. Then the divergence is absolute. Seems negligible,” the man said, looking at Lucilius with raised eyebrows, before they darkened again and he looked off, “… but it’s profound. So many things like that, subtle and profound. It’s always the smallest things that end up creating the biggest effect…” The man trailed off into silence, an unknown past torturing the man like an invisible vision.

 

“So what happened?”

 

The man looked back at Lucilius, the reverie broken. He grabbed Lucilius’ hands and looked at them like a palm-reader, then grunted.

 

“How’s the company going?” He asked without looking up.

 

“What?”

 

“Your company? How’s it going?”

 

“It’s… going well,” Lucilius said. “I took some time off to find you, but it’s on track to IPO sometime next year we’re thinking.”

 

The man laughed, a faint smile wearing his lips with nostalgic amusement. “That’s good,” he said, shaking his head gently. “That’s good.”

 

“I don’t understand. How did you know that? What happened?”

 

The man sighed again and looking at Lucilius he wore pity in his face as if wondering whether he should continue on or not. But Lucilius had come this far, and the man knew - Lucilius knew himself well enough to know he would not stop.

 

“I created you to handle that company. I couldn’t trust anyone else with that project - bioinformatics is so delicate, sensitive, and if I didn’t do it myself, someone else was going to try it and it could be a catastrophe in the wrong hands. So I created you.”

 

Memory suddenly collapsed in Lucilius’ mind as endless nights from the past few years flickered through his mind when he agonized over correct protocols and an elaborate system to protect the mass amount of bio-data his company held from falling into the wrong hands or the wrong use cases. His eyes grew wide as he looked back at the man who wore his own face.

 

The man was nodding. “I trust you’ve done well. Not just for yourself, but that you’ve carefully thought through it all, to make sure humanity doesn’t get this one wrong.”

 

A snarl of confusion and anger rose in Lucilius. “You couldn’t do it yourself?”

 

The man laughed for a moment. “Think of all the ideas you’ve had through the years. Almost all of the important ones are being carried out. By us.”

 

Lucilius stood, and unconsciously he started wandering around the room, suddenly lost in deep thought. Until a question cleaved his rumination.

 

“Wait. There have to be initial differences,” he said, looking back at the Original.

 

The Original nodded, and sighed. “Ethically ambiguous, but yes. You are missing only one small memory. Every clone but one is missing the same small memory.”

 

Lucilius’ eyes narrowed. “Tell me.”

 

The Original grew weary and nervous. He hadn’t thought this through. But he was in too deep now. He sighed, and then struggled to get up, pushing his knees down as his neglected body struggled. He shuffled to a wall where hung a framed sketch of a woman’s hands. The Original pulled the edge and the armed piece opened like a door, revealing a safe embedded into the wall. The Original spun the nob this way and that, and then cranked the handle and opened the safe. The thing was practically empty, save for a small, crumpled piece of paper. The Original took it and proffered it to Lucilius.

 

Lucilius took it and saw it was a receipt for coffee, until he turned it over. There was a phone number, scrawled, and underneath it, a hastily drawn heart.

 

A smile lifted a side of Lucilius’ face. “Oh yea..” He said, remembering, “..she was so beautifu—”

 

Lucilius looked up at the Original, his eyes narrowing. “I lost this,” he said, holding up the piece of paper.

 

The Original shook his head. “No you didn’t. I made you forget where it was. I literally made you without the memory of where you put it, and of course, I had it for myself.”

 

“But..” Lucilius contemplated it all, trying to fit it together. “Who is she?” Suddenly confused. “What’s she got to do with this?”

 

The Original sighed. “She and I became very close. Very close, and you see the problem is there’s only one of her. Us? Sure, it was worth it.  My ideas are coming to life - our ideas, for the greater good. And you -YOU-  can’t miss what you don’t know you missed out on.”

 

 

Lucilius looked at the piece of paper. “What happens if I dial this number?”

 

“Heh,” The Original laughed. “And what are you going to say? You have any idea how long it’s been, and what’s happened since? You still don’t know how any of this happened..” The Original motioned at himself and the apartment as he said it. “What are you going to do? Try and explain all this? Ruin her life, and the life of the other one?”

 

“The other one?”

 

The Original just looked at Lucilius with a resigned face.

 

“You didn’t…” Lucilius said, shaking his head. “She’s with a clone of us? Of you?”

 

“It was the only way.”

 

“Oh really, how’s that?” Lucilius snapped back.

 

“My work was not done! You were not created, the company you’ve created, and all the other projects that your brothers are carrying out, all of it was at risk with her in the picture!” The Original was practically screaming, the sadness and determination combining like a new toxin. “Setting up all of your different lives, inserting each of you perfectly, flawlessly, do you know how difficult all that was?”

 

“Where are they?”

 

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll drive yourself mad if you find them, if you see her with him. All that matters is that they are having those experiences, that those experiences exist.”

 

How could Lucilius not believe him? Like a person wrecked by a drug warning someone else to never take it. Lucilius looked at the old receipt paper in his hand, and wondered about what he did not know, wondering about what he never experienced. He tried to imagine some kind of far-off happiness, and strained to remember that woman’s face, but it was a useless task. What a strange comfort to know that somewhere out there, a form of himself was happy in a way he could not even fathom. 

 

He looked at the Original who had slumped back down on the couch, his face frozen in memory, of an experience relinquished, the water of his eyes glistening in the low light of the dingy apartment.

 

“Come on,” Lucilius said.

 

The Original looked at him. “What do you mean?”

 

 

“The company is doing just fine. I think I’ve done my part, and it’s time I take care of myself,” Lucilius said. It took a moment for the Original to realize what Lucilius said, and when he looked back at him, Lucilius winked.

 

“Come on, let’s get you out of this dump. If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s how to get your sorry ass back on your feet.

EVOLUTION OF CONCLUSION

February 26th, 2022

 

Is it good to judge an evolving thing? Say for instance, a child, who is learning the ways of the world. Would it be good to lay some sort of conclusive judgement on this kid after they, say… whack their brother in the face for no reason whatsoever? Of course not. Only the most short sighted and callous adult would write the child off as violent. We intuitively understand that children will learn and improve.

 

What’s a bit odd is that people continue to change throughout adulthood, but we ignore this fact. Or, at the least, we don’t give it the same sort of importance that we do when we think of children. It’s true that people, in general seem to be less capable of change as time goes on, but no one really wakes up the same exact person they were on the previous day. We all change a little, even if it’s imperceptible. 

 

Other things that rapidly evolve seem to get the adult-treatment. Most novel forms of technology for example, are tried and regarded as either good or bad, which is again quite odd since innovation can change a piece of technology and improve it. The most basic form of this today is simply the software update. Incredibly, updates are supposed to improve things but a lot of people dread updates because things change and suddenly the tried and true way of using a piece of software seems no longer available. 

 

The idea that things keep static is a convenient falsehood. Cognitively it’s far less taxing to assume the world and the people in it aren’t as dynamic and changing as they actually are. Such dynamism is also out of sync with the static nature of words and the labels we create with them and slap on to different things: that person is a psycho, this app sucks. Well did you see the new update? Did you know that person was grieving and had almost no sleep during the last few days? Our labels for the world have to be constantly updated when new information arises, but this requires the actual information, which might not be available, and it requires a willingness and a desire to make the mental update. Neither of which always happen.

 

Perhaps religions have a concept of a ‘final judgement’ because it’s simply impossible to make a conclusive judgement while things are still in progress. Nuance is hard to catch on the fly while it changes, and the mind constantly yearns for a definitive last word. But the truth is it’s all just laziness. People dread the update of their own mind the same way they dread the new phone update. It’s pure laziness, because all these changes, all these updates, all the effort required to incorporate new information? It’ll lead to a better world, and a better experience - that is, if we’re willing to make the effort.