Out of Warning Signs

At some point, the Victorian Board of Education set as a text a play set in Newcastle about a blue collar worker who had a friend in management, a deadbeat girlfriend and a sister with special needs and the play followed his life basically falling apart.

We had to read the play script, and I think my school even had the budget to bus us to Melbourne to see a theatre company put on a couple of key scenes from the play.

I can't remember the name of the play, I could probably find an archive of set texts for the years I did highschool but it's not important for setting the scene here.

The play was about the deindustrialization of the late 80s that happened in a lot of places. The climax of the play involved the worker grandstanding as he realised he was going to become structurally unemployed, have to put his sister in a home and his girlfriend would leave him and his best friend betrayed him, so he douses himself in petrol and makes this big speech before revealing it was just water and getting arrested or something.

At some point in his speech he says "if the writing was on the wall how come it wasn't read aloud?" and that probably makes an impression on me, because it was this complaint of a type that the obvious was not obvious enough.

I hope, the playwright wasn't meaning it literally in terms of a steelworker being illiterate and so newspapers and P&L statements etc should be read out to people.

Now, where I'm at in terms of navigating "the world" as we call it, is this space where I'm bracing for just a wall of stupid to come crashing down. It's really hard to define, but I think we've been networking stupid up and some of it is obvious - like the flat earth conspiracy community - where not so much new forms but new levels of stupid have been made possible by not just the internet, but social media, algorithms etc.

It's the less obvious stuff. Like, go back to 2004, smartphones aren't quite a thing yet, and if they are only executives use them to email. People are commuting to work driving their Hyundai, with a bowl of cereal between their legs, texting their mum using a numeric keypad on their Nokia to confirm plans for Easter, applying lipstick and listening to talkback radio. This is stupid, and a daily routine. What makes it nefariously stupid though, is that it's reasonably safe. This person stop-starting through peak hour traffic may have increased their chance of having a traffic accident a thousandfold.

But what that looks like, is that when they are driving with their hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, watching the traffic and doing headchecks and mirror checks, they may only have a 1 in 100,000 chance of having an accident. With their phone, the cereal, the makeup the whole morning routine, their chances of having an accident jump up to 1 in 1,000.

That means this individual can be expected to maintain their morning commute without incident for three whole years. In the meantime, to compound their stupidity, each time they drive dangerously and don't have an accident, they build their confidence that their driving practices are safe. This is likely how someone winds up driving through rush hour with a bowl of cereal between their knees, applying makeup while texting their mum.

Now, we live in a world where reports are being written by nobody, read by nobody, executive summaries are being summarized, people are subbing in statistically generated grammar for thought, simply because they can't tell the difference.

People are potentially already making hiring decisions, where they are like "well I could hire a receptionist, but what if my receptionist could also give me legal, medical and fashion advice..."

And it seems likely to me, that the potential cumulative stupidity we are building up, is likely far far larger than I can imagine.

Now I've steered this in the direction of generative "AI" or LLMs but I suspect my real concern, and the real subject of this post, about writing on a wall and it not being read aloud, has been with us longer in the form of siloing via algorithms. Internet echochambers. 

Its the conundrum of even being able to warn anybody anymore of anything.

So Hard to Describe

I don't think it's a "chicken little the sky is falling" thing, or a "boy who cried wolf" thing even, this is more something sci-fi short story writer Harlen Ellison put his finger on:

You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.

That's from 1993 according to wikiquote. I'm talking about something that has evolved into something more. 

It's sharing a planet with a population for which if you put up a warning sign, the response may be "I didn't think I had to take it seriously, nobody warned me that I should pay attention to a warning sign."

So you put up a warning sign that says "warning: things warned of in warning signs may be real and actual." and then someone with bleeding stumps says "well nobody warned me that the warning about heeding warning signs was something I needed to pay attention to. I thought I could choose to ignore it."

The world we live in seems to have become a little more "Land of do as you please" and a little more "Global Cassandra" where Cassandra is the priestess of Apollo who was cursed by Him with the gift of prophecy but nobody would believe her. As such in Greek classics like the Iliad and Odyssey and plays, she gets all these scenes like "That Horse is full of Greeks that will destroy Troy if you bring them inside the gates" and "Agamemnon your wife Clytemnestra is having an affair and they are going to kill you in the bath and then kill me." and so forth.

A few weeks ago, I was watching a guy present to a group of old people about basically how the "Awokening" has collapsed, that loose cluster of memes and rhetoric that hung about for a decade, accomplished some things, but not what they were intended to. I felt in my waters that the fever broke pretty much in 2024 after Kamala lost the election and it seems to be an insurmountable reckoning that rather than being wrong, the memes were just insurmountably unpopular and grossly unequal. This guy was pretty much doing a post-mortem, very clinically and citing data to serve as proxies for the nebulous thing.

And Bitcoin's value in USD I believe crashed far enough that somebody with their money in an index fund for the past five years will finally have outperformed the bitcoin bubble. It has almost halved in USD since October of last year.

But then there's the Space X IPO, and I still have to hear about "AI" all the time in my contact with educational institutions. In terms of being a Cassandra, it was this depressing moment when I perhaps became truly old, understanding that there is always going to be something.

Like I already was persuaded to accept tentatively the position of moral-progress skepticism, but I was thinking in terms of living memory. Now I'm thinking, moral-progress has a half-life of less than a lifetime. 

And it's not young people, like I don't think the young can really put the thumb on the scale, and people are remaining infantalised longer and longer. It's this strange thing of like, like today the media got details of the agreement signed between Trump admin. and Iran to open up the straight of Hormuz for 60 or 90 days or whatever. And fucking journalists this was their moment to finally suggest that maybe the US had gone and done a debacle. 

I've heard people comment on access-media, both for Disney and the White House, but I think there's something bigger than that at play too. It's like journalism at some point, began to see themselves as diplomats. Or rather, constrained as diplomats, but not just in what they could say, but what they could think.

Like journalists by and large, had to pretend that a President had some kind of strategic interest in the decisions they make. I don't think I want to live in this world where presentable people in good suits sit at desks in big fancy studios on the BBC and ABC and situation room and wherever else who all seem decent and respectable and constantly confused by the news they are reporting.

I think I would prefer to live in a world where a sleazeball ashes their cigarette into a crystal ash tray with dark rings under their eyes and sweaty patches under their arms and they are astonished by nothing that they read because they are a real journalist whose investigations and experience of the world have turned them cynical.

I fucking hate the "Leopards ate my face" meme, it is so improv, alas, it's true, but what I'm saying is that we seem to be living in some kind of world where we have to assume that the people who vote for the face eating leopards party, are the people who will say "I had no idea leopards were dangerous animals that eat people's faces" and then we say "but we told you they were dangerous animals that will eat people's faces, and not only that but they told you they were dangerous animals that eat people's faces and if elected will eat your face AND WE TOLD YOU THEY TOLD YOU THAT." and they say "oh...I just thought you were brainwashed or had some agenda."

That's the scary nature of our times. Some fucking mind bending bullshit where to say "you were told" earns you a "yeah but you didn't tell me you were telling me." or more simply "oh but I was also told something else" and if you are like "so how did you choose?" they are like "I chose what felt good in the moment."