Limits of Postmodernity

Postmodernism works, provided you have buffer between power and reality. A position that ultimately isn't tenable.

Lately I've been reflecting on what it means for something to be "bad" as opposed to a word more virulent like "evil" to explain my own emotional investment or lack thereof in things. Something is bad if it isn't ultimately going to work.

"Postmodernism" I should be clear, I am using via the general usage I come across. It likely means something specific in academic circles, but for me it is the general idea that "truth" is a construct determined by power. 

I'm persuaded by Brown professor Glenn Lowry, that money is not a social construction but a convention, but that is a technicality. It is sufficiently constructed and sufficiently neutral to be a good go to example of postmodernism in practice. 

How many bananas are there? This question represents the buffer zone in which postmodernism works, before it breaks down. The question has an answer, but our ability to determine the answer is extremely limited. All over the world there are Schrodinger's fruitbowl situations going where people think they have a banana, forgot they had a banana, expect to have bananas, are going to pick their bananas, are planting next seasons bananas, are going to the store for bananas, dropped their banana. 

The people will wake up tomorrow to discover they in fact, don't have bananas, discover their banana is rotten, have a cyclone take out their banana crop, have a fungus infect their crop, have a bumper crop, have their plantation repossessed or nationalised, realise they need more bananas for the recipe, get offered a free banana and discover a banana was in fact just a decorative plastic banana.

Multiply this uncertainty by everything and you have what all money represents. All the uncertainty in reality tends to be fairly stable, such that in large numbers like a global economy we can generally rely that while we don't know how many bananas there are, we are not going to be so far off as it turning out tomorrow that there are "no bananas" or "everything is bananas."

We expect that markets will quickly and efficiently correct for these uncertainties with price changes. But occassionally, a market can cumulate errors until reality pushes back and we can get a shocking crash. This is literally what happened in the GFC where Collaterized Debt Obligations (CDOs) were believed to be as safe as US government bonds, AAA rated by agencies, and they turned out to be worth nothing. There just is no way that tiny pieces of mortgage debt taken out by people with no income, no job and no savings in return for penalty interest rates that could be discharged by mailing the keys to the property back to the lender was as safe a financial product as bonds issued by the treasury of a state with its capacity to tax future generations to pay off the debt.

But for a while, paper wealth was created by the stories being told by those powerful enough to tell them, which could be exchanged for real wealth. People would buy shitty mortgages packaged as CDOs with money, real money that could be used to buy real assets.

That's the bufferzone in which postmodernism can work.

Postmodernism then, firstly requires modernity, it requires people with a capacity for story to be living on the grid. This is to say, they are not capable of feeding and clothing themselves, but instead dependent on massively complicated supply chains that span the globe. This means people can't really comprehend their own lives, but lacking comprehension they still function.

They go to work, and are vaguely aware this activity results in deposits being paid to their bank, a process that is increasingly an abstract operation of numbers. This allows them to go to a supermarket and purchase garlic when it isn't in season, because it is shipped from China or Mexico. If they live in Australia they may go to and from the shops in a vehicle that was manufactured in a factory somewhere around the world and then put onto a ship before being loaded onto a truck and driven to a dealership that then sold it or leased it either to them or some series of previous owners or users. It is fuelled with an oil derivative or charged from the grid both of which people around the world are currently fighting eachother to death about.

Humanity would literally die out, tomorrow, if the citizens of Earth were required to understand things before they used them.

As such, in this modern world where people who need milk don't milk something to get milk, you can tell reality altering stories by creating information that is separate and distinct from knowledge. 

Simple examples, you can tell a story about how popular a political leader is. Ordinary people do not have the resources to verify or investigate such claims. You can pay people just to repeat it, you can obfuscate the inaccuracy of this claim on reality by putting the source of the data behind a paywall so very few people can read the methodology and question it.

You can tell stories about the future that are baseless, like that in ten years we will have solved mortality and everyone will have nanobots in their bloodstream making ongoing repairs to our tissue in real time such that everybody alive can run a 200km ultramarathon. This way the average person can direct their creative energies to a tech-hub for decades before common-knowledge stumbles upon the reality that there is nothing to indicate such breakthroughs are imminent.

Such stories alter reality by having people believe them. Such that even if the stories have no basis in reality, anyone trying to build a working understanding of reality now have to contend with a reality where a bunch of people believe in something unreal. eg. people trying to address catastrophic climate change have to build into their solutions the fact that a whole bunch of people think the issue is a hoax.

Conclusion

The point of this stubby nub of a post, is that yes, thinkers like Michel Foucalt and Derrida and Judith Butler have made genuine contributions to intellectual thought including useful ideas. 

But it operates in this limited space that basically says "a lie can persist up until the point that the truth is revealed."

So yes, power knowledge is a thing, you can class same-sex attraction as a mental illness that spreads through social contagion (grooming) and try to cure it through electroshock therapy for a very long time, but it isn't going to work because homosexuality appears to be innate and just crops up in the population so all you do is increase the suffering for as long as you can persist in the delusion. 

How long such an example can persist is undetermined. Conversion therapy is still in effect in the world, yet other jurisdictions have presumably done enough science based mapping to abandon stories for knowledge and determined that there is no evidence conversion therapy works, and there is evidence it is damaging.

While I concede that postmodernist thought has a place, I think it is bad, as in it can't work. The sum total of postmodernism's promise is that it can make us feel good until our denial can no longer be sustained. 

Personally, I would rather feel bad now by confronting exactly how bleak a situation is, so I can feel better in the future by reacting to reality in some positive action beyond telling myself a feel good story.

Go scientific method!

Australian Social Media Ban for Under 16s and State Intervention in Norms

 I want to keep this brief because the emotion that motivates me is annoyance. 

Australia passed a world first piece of legislation that banned people under 16 from having social media accounts. 

The question as to what will happen if kids get around the enforcement of this ban has been asked and answered, and then, here comes the annoying part - asked again.

Growing up in Ballarat I never touched a cigarette, even though the first photo of me ever tagged on facebook is one in which I have a cigarette in each nostril and earhole, an act of drunken disrespect where I destroyed about $5 of a friend's property. But I knew of Poony the milkbar/newsagent owner who was known to sell cigarettes to children. 

I knew smokers who were 13, and my education that had us role play "peer-pressure" scenarios where I would be offered cigarettes and we had to learn how to say "no" pathetic as they were, were also overkill because it isn't easy to get a 13 year old to share cigarettes, probably because they are neither cheap nor easy to obtain.

Other realities were acknowledged, probably unsanctioned by our education system, but it was useful for me at least, and perhaps an introduction into socioeconomic realities when in a moment of candour Mr. Martin on a hunch asked Erin, an 11 or 12 year old classmate of mine, if her parents had given her cigarettes and Erin said yes.

The fact that kids were able to obtain cigarettes in the mid 90s up until present day is no argument for scrapping a prohibition against underage smoking. 

I had a similar annoyance around the "debate" regarding Melbourne's harsh lockdowns albeit from the opposite direction when they attempted to lock down specific Melbourne postcodes between lockdowns 1 and 2. Locking down postcodes was unworkable, unenforceable and plebs immediately reached for their individual exceptionalism sooner than their sense of social responsibility.

After I don't know, one or two days the Andrews government locked down Melbourne. While it is pure speculation, I suspect the odds are favorable that some meathead planning to flee their fingered postcode to go stay with a relative found a phone call going one of two ways - mostly it would have been "Sure Sheryl it's bloody ridiculous, come on down and we can take the kids to laser tag and other super-spreader activities" OR less often "Don't you fucken dare come here bringing covid and lockdown down on us!" those poor hypothetical Cassandras.

But, entirely predictably, the attempt to surgically lockdown postcodes failed quickly and all of Melbourne went into lockdown 2 which lasted months while the murdoch press raged, and conspiracy theories boomed and dickheads succeeded in nothing but making a bad situation worse. The government that locked us down then won a free and fair election in a landslide.

What is missed, is that in terms of physics and statistics, the City of Melbourne cannot be locked down. Melbourne has more people than island nation of New Zealand, in 2025 the entire state of Victoria has about 15k Police staff, about 12k excluding public servants so administrators. The police are less than 1% of the population, technically as bound by the laws of physics, the police are incapable of administering breathalyser blood-alcohol tests, let alone locking down an entire metropolitan population.

But it is possible, because of human behaviour - most people obey most of the laws of the land. If everyone drove drunk, and ignored the police officer guiding them toward the "booze bus" and just sped off, we just don't have the resources as a society, the police presence to track them down, let alone high-speed pursuits. 

I heard somewhere, in some news report TLDR or something, that 30% of adults surveyed said they would help their children get around the social media ban. I don't know what's up with those parents, I don't know what relationship they have with their child that makes them want to take positive action to keep them on tik-tok. The best argument I heard from youtuber struthless was that for queer kids and disabled kids social media allows them to find communities they simple can't get in RL, but 30% seems way high for the population of kids that fall into those margins. 

What I am prone to imagine, is something like a dance mum, a showbiz mum and weaker, and of course dad's too whether through omission or commission I hold accountable for what likely transpires to be a large personality cohort of morons who think it is important that their kids be internet famous or some shit, as well as drowning time-impoverished parents who need a distraction machine to take away parental attention in order to survive.

But I easily imagine back in the late 80s early 90s when our government like many others around the world began to denormalise smoking based on the adverse impacts on health (that are less obvious than social media's impact on the modal person) that a survey would have shown on the advent of the first ban on cigarette vending machines in public spaces that some 30% of parents said they would buy cigarettes for their children. It's easy to imagine because I met parents well into the smoking ban that not only would give their kids smokes, but offer their kids friends (me) a rip of a bong.

The beauty of a blunt instrument like a citywide lockdown, is that it is easy to enforce when police don't have to go "if we stop this person we have a 116 point checklist of reasonable exceptions for them to be out and about." In Melbourne's lockdown there were just 5 reasons you could be outside your home - shopping trip, exercise, doctor's appointment, essential worker, carer or something. 

Delightfully, most people got it, hence the volume got to a point where our limited law enforcement resources could largely successfully uphold the lockdown. But the percentage of people who do not get the concept of "others" could have been as high as 30%. One thing to throw out from the Covid years in Melbourne, and likely can be generalised to the world, is that if children are too sheltered and spoiled "these days" it is because adults are too sheltered and spoiled too. 

I mean, and I'm working myself into a tizzy, I can recall at the daily press briefings which were so fucking simple literally if the case numbers were going up, the lockdown was continuing for the short-term forseeable future, and if the numbers were going down, the lockdown was continuuing for the short-term but tracking toward ending. I remember journalists people paid to hold power to account asking if a fucking highly contagious virus would make an exception for Easter lunch so fucking authoritarian families could gather at super-spreader events.

Just as a child may throw a tantrum because a parent says they can't have their screen time because they didn't eat their vegetables, we saw plain as day journalists advocating on behalf of adults throwing a tantrum because they couldn't go to the pub for after work drinks because they hadn't gone two weeks without being a disease vector.

It was the same thing with masks, whether they worked or not, mandating masks created a new norm that let everyone know that things were not normal. They are a simple and effective way to put the population on "pandemic alert" mode. When masks are normalised, your boss is unambiguously the arsehole for demanding workers come into the office.

Bringing us back to the beautiful simplicity of Australia's social media ban - for like almost a week now Australia has this new state imposed norm - kids should not be on fucking social media. Maybe 30% of parents hate this, because their tedious unlikeable kids just do shitty viral dances for tiktok so pedophiles can rub one out to them, but there will be 30% maybe more of parents who are fucking whistling and skipping now because they had to get their kids a phone and let them use social media because if they didn't they would be excluded. 

Now it is unambiguous, if you as a parent are putting your 12 year old on social media, you are arsehole parents. And you'll be fine, all you've lost is the ability to gain status and esteem by talking about how your kid is an "influencer" or whatever because very quickly it will not be socially acceptable to do so, but you will absolutely get away with giving your kid social media just like parents in the 90s got away with giving their kids cigarettes and alcohol.