The Web of Revelations
I had the chance to see this marvelous sculpture in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Maybe you always wondered why STEM nerds are spending so much time on equations and chalkboards. A part of the answer is that there is nothing as enticing as a strip-tease. Unlike the statue, the process of unveiling is a costly process: it requires time and dedication. It is not like using a search engine or an LLM. Typing a prompt and waiting for an answer or scrolling down social media feed is also not going to do it. Yet it is what “trust the science” is all about. The “science” —as in “trust the science”— has become synonymous with received wisdom. A kind of revelation, but who reveals what to whom? How is it done?
Cartesian Closed Categories
How do we know things is an eternal question. Maybe the most radical thinker was René Descartes who applies radical skepticism in order to find a bedrock —cogito ergo sum— from which he was able to expand. At my level I have spent a lot of time thinking about that. I recently wrote a post about the subject
My angle here is to tackle this question from the perspective of how it is done rather than how it should be done.
Lets rewind a little bit to have more context. Before internet most of conversations were not mediated by technology. You went to the pub, to an open air market, to a sport club, to a chess clubs, to neighborhood parties, or to general meetings in universities etc. They were occasions where you could meet and talk with strangers. The process was not monitored nor guided as it is the case on social media. On social media you mostly “see” people that have been presented to you by the algorithm, a bit of luck also. The control of the conversation exists even if it is subtle and hard to grasp. Mainly it is done by promoting positively or negatively the posts. The social media platforms can tune the temperature with extreme precision: how many of people following you are going to see your posts? Which ones? Because if, as a platform, I display your post to people with whom you have less interaction, then I am killing the story while still being able to show that the post was seen… This is the first idea that crossed my mind. Give me half a week and I am sure that I can come up with a dozen of pretty elaborate scenarios. I am not a professional, but the people in charge at X are. They can make much smarter and less visible manipulations.
So where does our ideas on far away events come from ? Unlike what was the case in the past, it is very hard to pinpoint. The New York Times exists but it is a largely discredited edition. More probably you got your news through social media. It means that you got the information that vaccines were safe and effective from there. So you read an article from an outlet specifically targeted at you, one way or another. Don’t think that your neighbor, virtual and real, got the information from the same article. There are no longer Bob Woodward or Seymour Hersh anymore (true Seymour is still alive but he is getting very old). What you got was probably an article tailored to you. It works at many levels: the depth at which scientific explanations are given (from Nature to the New York Post passing by Scientific American), what are your political orientations etc. Add on top of the that the filter of the editorial board of scientific journal and you realize that most of what you know is in fact a revelation.
It is true that it was somewhat the case before too. As Descartes, we have to find a basis in which we have reasonable trust from which we can think. Before social media this basis was maybe wrong (as always) but at least we had strict consistency.
We now have lost any semblance of consistency of course. The more important thing is that we have replaced one revelation with a web of revelations. Those revelations are somehow intertwined —the same narrative is declined over and over. Slightly adapted to the audience and the circumstances. Nonetheless the landscape is not a continuum. It is the total opposite: are you for immigration or do you want to build a wall? The abortion problem is the poster child (pun intended) of those kinds of issue. Vaccines safety and efficiency is a more recent one. There is also the now usual: are you for Ukraine —whatever that means in concrete terms but generally it means sign this blank check here— or are you sold to Putin? etc.
The characteristic of revelations is that you don’t argue with them. You accept the revelation, it is like a fact in the ideal world. It is not like an unveiling that is an active phenomenon. One problem is that there is no point debating a revelation. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised by how the public debate has evolved lately.
The end of debate
The Book of Revelation (singular not plural, it is not a small detail) is the one of the end of times. Today we experience the end of debate. It manifests itself technologically and socially. On the technological side, I am sure that you have experienced a shrinking feeling of the user experience on X. There is this novel Mood Indigo by Boris Vian. It is maybe very hard to translate the french title l’écume des jours. The literal translation might be The froth of days. In the story the house of the main protagonist is shrinking by the day. It is an allegory of the illness of his lover. The very same feeling can be almost physically be felt on X. The circle of people with whom you interact is shrinking. Another interesting related literary theme is The Magic Skin and The Wild Ass's Skin by H. Balzac. This is about a talisman that is a piece of paper on which is written “If you own me, you will own everything, but your life will belong to me”. The trick is that every time the talisman is used to get earthly things makes it dwindle as the life of its owner. This is not just mere speculation on my part, just check by yourselves. I made a screen grab because the terms will change in a not so distant future.
On the social part the end of debate manifests itself by how words are manipulated. You can no longer debate anymore when the language has been debased. It transpires in every news story. You can feel it intuitively but there are objective proofs: the effort spent by the institution to redefine terms and words is not a feeling: here is what the, sic, “Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and Subsector Coordinating Council's Joint Mis/Disinformation Working Group”, USA administration produce. Such documents may appear boring but they are here to pave the ground for pre-bunking operations. Pre-bunking is the thought version of pre-crime. Imagine spreading democracy through drone strikes, this is the same thing on the information front. The aim is explicitly to act on the terms of the debate so that some opinions are rejected without having been examined. It has been years now that the issue is no longer free speech. It is free thinking.
"If you own me you will own everything but your life will belong to me. God willed it so. Desire, and your desires will be fulfilled. But match your wishes on your life. Your life is there. With each desire I will decrease. Like your days. Do you want me? God will hear you. Be it!"