Social Distancing In The Opium Den

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."
~ Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947

Maybe it's just me, but other than thinned out traffic, there doesn't seem to be all that much difference between social distancing and the default mode of day to day life as it's mutated over the last couple of decades or so. This plague surprised us as Camus said it would, but we've quickly moved our personal, professional, and casual circles online. Truth be told we moved the important stuff and relationships online some years ago — and even pre-bug spent most of our time interacting with them on a screen, often with not even so much as a video feed.

Our meat-space interactions are merely grist for the storyboards of our digital lives, becoming old-home-movie visits to some strange shore to be described, selfied, analyzed and compared with those of the other ephemeral creatures we've come to know in what has become our real lives — the blogs and Facebooks and TikToks and Instagrams and Tumblrs and Skypes and Zooms — our real lives which exist, paradoxically, in a virtual space.

Social isolation, fragmentation, and the ongoing and accelerating retreat into our virtual community/tribal silos has been the focus of much angst lately and that was well before the teeny-plague got here.

So what has the bug highlighted? Just this little snippet that says it all: Since the beginning of agriculture, about 12,000-25,000 years ago, never has humanity been so fragmented that a "stay the fuck away from everyone" order was actually embarrassingly easy for most of us to implement.

For example other than interactions with my immediate family, it's of zero consequence to me at all. Now, this is probably partially due to the fact that I'm "essential", which means that I go to a job at least half of every week, which mostly consists of "staying the fuck away from everyone" while I do what needs done which is probably marginally less isolating than a complete "Stay Home" lockdown. And, as y'all probably know, personal interaction hasn't exactly been my forte at the best of times.

But even taking that into account, most people that I've talked to in every category across the range from empaths to sociopaths are just bored — scared sometimes, scrambling sometimes, angry sometimes — but as to missing the closeness of the tribe, they're fine online thanks.

Even the "rebels" (read "morons") who can't get a handle on staying away from each other seem mostly to be clotting up in little wads of "finding-temporary-new-fuck-partners, zero-functional styling and profiling" groups rather than any actual human contact.

See, for example, every spring break beach in the country and Fundie Christians and Orthodox Jews battling to be the most Publicly Faithful with their delusional viral snake-handling.

Or were you under the impression that these irresponsible arterial plaques of society are indulging in the primitive need for social interchange between humans? I dunno, maybe, but I didn't see much bonding and exchange of ideas or group battle vibe going on out there unless it was encoded in beer-and-mai-tai puke on the beach or the communal crackers and grape-juice sharing of the True Believers- (which has always struck me as being about as hygienic as a hot-tub in a strip club even before COVID-19).

Maybe I'm just missing the point, but there seems no new breakthroughs in the meta-consciousness or psychic bonding of these dangerous, superficial flash-mob pseudo-tribes, nor in any of the others that have turned up to thumb their noses at the rest of us.

No, I think this entire thing has merely highlighted an uncomfortable truth that we've all half-assed acknowledged, but try to deny when confronted: We're vastly more comfortable with the machine versions of us than the real.

We continue to merge with our AI on a geometric curve so steep it makes COVID-19 graphs look billiard-table flat; we're immersed in our machines to the point that our AI is rapidly incorporating us into a single thing only marginally connected with what has become the shabby ghetto of real life. Using a Star Trek metaphor, we've become addicted to the Holodeck to a greater or lesser degree.

Feel free to believe it's "lesser" in your case if you like.

(Marginal Note: Funny thing, literally the first time I saw a rendition of the Holodeck, I was instantly taken out of the suspension of disbelief necessary for the show. I found it literally impossible to believe for even a second that such a thing could exist that would not wipe out the entire species in two generations, never mind be just a casual plaything on the Enterprise. You'd as well wire them all to that "orgasm" button that the lab rats used to push till they died of starvation and exhaustion.)

The early days of excitement for all the connections possible and the potential for what could happen if any human on earth could access a vast pool of every bit of human knowledge, the potential for bonding and exponential information exchange between groups that would never be in the same place together — well, it was a big deal.

At first, commercial interests recognized the enormous potential to having access to large pools of people to sell stuff to, but they tried to divide us all up again, the way it was always done for a "real" physical market. Those were the days of "AOL" aka "The Great Satan" who divided the information and contacts available on the internet into "AOL" and "Everything Else" and Netscape, the website that would work some places but not others.

But then, in a stroke of near-genius, it suddenly occurred to the corporate interests who were trying to sell us their version of online reality that they were chasing the wrong end of the problem:

It didn't matter what their version of reality was. What mattered was predicting how people were going to react to it and (crucially) what they'd probably buy from it.

Digital-age marketing research was born. No longer was it necessary for a company to invest astounding amounts of money into a project based on "Ad Men" style best-guesses only to watch it fail because their "model" was wrong and no one would buy it. Instead, they could take the decision-making data from literally millions of people and use it to test small, cheap, and fast products to see if they were going to fly before ramping up to the expensive versions.

This is how stop-gap, single-function, Version 0.1 software hits the market — if no one likes or can think of a use for your product it dies and you drop it and move on to the next idea. This is MUCH cheaper than spending months or years with a staff of coders writing a full-blown, polished suite of stuff and have it fail.

This was combined with sometimes astonishing predictive algorithms that have access to the data churned out by the chaotic decision-making of vast pools of people which, it turned out, could be used to find out what many of them do in response to a given stimulus. The more data they had, the more impressive the mind-reading tricks became.

Thus, from selling TV-and-newspaper-style advertising space, the sites who survived or grew out of the dot-com crash were those who'd left the old-style revenue stream altogether and who were now selling — us. They were data aggregators, and we became the product. The goods they were selling us were rapidly-evolving, Darwinistic-determined flashes in the pan that shortly filtered out the garbage and produced the frankly spectacular programs we routinely use and access without a thought today.

As one immediate result, the literature is replete with scary stories of people or groups who were identified as, for example, being pregnant before they told anyone. Turns out that their datapoints and histories identified lifestyle changes and purchasing decisions which were common to pregnant people, including such mundaina as "buying more cotton balls".

This was, in fact, impressive, because even a 10% "hit" rate is vastly more profitable than a "rule-of-thumb" guess using half-assed data, which all marketing had been to that point. But the truth of the matter is that humans, as noted, have chaotic decision-making processes which make the magic trick harder and harder to perform.

Human decision making in large groups becomes an exercise in the same sort of prediction as forecasting the weather, with rapidly diminishing accuracy the further out it's pushed. In weather, this works out to about 3 days of really frequent accuracy to about 10 days before you'd be as well off just throwing darts. In human decision making, it seems to run to about 10% over the long term¹. Ask Hillary how plus-or-minus error bars in human prediction can be an issue.

So, now the data-collectors and algorithm-writers must collect simply enormous amounts of data to move the needle even a fractional percent. Until, yet again, a stroke of genius:

It occurred to them that algorithms are not the problem. People are the problem.

And it turns out it's vastly simpler to hammer people into the algorithm than it is to continue to keep writing more complex algorithms that only move the result a smaller and smaller fraction along the asymptotic curve toward "zero additional result".

Our machines, in short, have over the course of about three decades gone from "tools to make our live easier" to "tools to solve the problem of humans", and these days if you're going to participate in our new merged AI/Human version of society, you're usually going to do so by making it easy on them — not them serving you.

While researching what can be predicted about human behavior is still a big-money expense for corporations, political campaigns, and governments, all of whom are trying to bring you (and your resources) into their tribes, vast sums are now being spent on the other end of the problem — how to get that 80% - 90% who don't consistently follow the algorithm over the long term into lock-step with their more-predictable brethern.

Can we all say "fake news", "biased reporting", "filtered coverage", "them vs us", "Facebook", "Instagram Influencers", "Click Bait", CNN, FoxNews, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Murdoch, RNC, DNC, N. Korea, Russia, China, etc., etc., etc. — and that's without even much touching the corporate interests.

Rushkoff with his "Team Human" approach² in which he tries to explain that humans are worth saving thinks we can turn this all around. Personally I doubt it. We've been too long on the Holodeck. Our real life selves already moulder and fade away like corpses in a Oculus-wired opium den.

It's probably not going to be my problem anyhow. I'm too old to fight in anymore wars or take to the streets again for any particular reason. There's no likelihood I'll be called back into the breach.

And I don't know if the generation coming up behind us even recognizes the danger, much less has the unwired capability of deciding to act on it. All I know for sure is that it's going to be an interesting 20 years.

"Interesting" in the Chinese sense.

Hope I'm wrong.

---

<sup>1. [https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/06/big-data-whats-even-creepier-than-target-guessing-that-youre-pregnant.html]↩

2. [Team Human: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is1YUQVYkvY]↩</sup>