Great delamination
|
The JC is cultivating a theory that, at a point in the last decade, the online universe — the one you’re in now, dear reader, as you peer through crusted specs through this frame into our fully tractable simulacrum — and the real universe, out there, with trees and flowers and basil fotherington-tomas[1] (note to file: we will need a snappy word for each: I vote “Offworld” and “Onworld”) diverged — “delaminated” — and each set off along its own independent, meandering trajectory. At a point — we date it to 10 January 2016 — the Onworld and Offworld finally lost contact.
They now bear absolutely no relation to each other. The separate realms have become “non-overlapping magisteria,” to use Stephen Jay Gould’s excellent term.[2] It is a category error to apply standards developed in one to situations arising in the other.
The Onworld and the Offworld
Online — the “Onworld” — is unilateral: one-to-many, deterministic, delineated, rigid, scaled, binary, digital, definitive, eliminative and final. It is like code: exact, precise, machined.
It has, therefore, zero-tolerance. “Tolerance” implies sloppiness, ambiguity and weakness. Tolerance is analogue. The Onworld is digital.
The Onworld consists in, and of, data. Data is of the past. Irony: desxxpite its apparent modernity, the Onworld is mechanistic, finite and historical: it is not futuristic, but backward looking.
Real life — the “Offworld” — is bilateral: one-to-one, graduated, ambiguous, deprecated, provisional, malleable, nuanced and forgiving. It flexes. It acknowledges that for all you do know, there is infinitely more you do not. It is necessary tolerant and open-minded, as you have to be when you don’t know what is coming next. It asks us to apply imaginative open-mindedness to invent excellent outcomes, with whatever criteria for “excellent” then appeal to us. It is human, infinite and forward-looking. Being human, it offers scope for redemption, reinvention, and reconfiguration.
The Dissimulacrum
This means that what was a “simulacrum” increasingly no longer is. There is much danger in confusing the two. Elemental manifestations: online discourse and discourse in real life are qualitatively, and quantitatively different.
No-one is perfect —neither the judge or the judged — so in the Offworld we must make allowances for error, misunderstanding, misapprehension: our own, and each other’s. But in the Onworld, that ostensible fallibility has fallen away it is not possible. Judgment is simply a special case of categorisation. We can, do, and to get by, must categorise.
The day of delamination: BlackStar
So when did this great delamination happen?
The JC dates that loss of contact to 2016 — specifically, 10 January 2016, or “BlackStar”. The “great delamination” at which the digital/analogue separation became irreversible, is a key inflexion point in the social history of the 21st century.
We cannot prove, or even give evidence, that Bowie was fundamental to things keeping together, but the dates check out. The great weirding commenced with the collective expiry of cultural touchstones across the spectrum: Bowie, Harper Lee, George Martin, Prince, Muhammad Ali, Ronnie Corbett, Glenn Frey, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, Carrie Fisher and of course Rick Parfitt from Status Quo. From then things just got weirder, and have not really come right since. Trump, Brexit, Covid, Ukraine, Crypto, the neo space race — these are all symptoms of a collective mind that has lost its way.
Disentanglement
Because the magisteria are fully “disentangled” — the causal arrow is broken in both directions — it has become impossible for independent observers in one magisterium to understand corresponding rationales imported from the other.
This presents a “cancellation problem” for subjects who still equate their own personal cognitive states between the two worlds. Whereas to an observer, digital person A and analogue person A’ are distinct and unconnected, in person A’s own mind they are, of course, one and the same.
Many of the serial sociopolitical and cultural disasters we are encountering at the moment are the result of people confusing their magisteria.
See also
- Data modernism and the cult of the average
- Finite and Infinite Games
- Rocks of Ages
- Non-overlapping magisteria
- Molesworth
References
- ↑ ‘I simply don’t care a row of buttons whether it was a goal or not nature alone is beattful’
- ↑ Rocks of Ages.