Friday, March 08, 2024
ISIS: A virtual reality
[This piece is reposted from 4/9/22, updated in the context of Israel vs. Hamas and Ukraine vs. Russia, with reference to the recent ISIS attack in Russia]
The etymology of the phrase "virtual reality" takes a twisty path from its Latin roots. Of course, by the time children are in middle school they know what virtual reality is, but ask them to define it. Then ask yourself. In this essay I assemble what knowledge I can about "virtual reality" and the role the concept plays in modern society. At the end I relate what I find to our conception of the terrorist group Islamic State, or ISIS (with addendums on the Israel/Hamas and Russia/Ukraine/and now ISIS wars).
A good dictionary (in this case Merriam-Webster) covers the basics: "Virtual" is related to the noun, "virtue," which we know to mean, "a morally good quality," like integrity or honesty, from Latin virtus, "merit," "perfection," from vir, "man." The transition from vir to the rest is a challenging etymological puzzle (while you're at it, consider "woman of virtue"), but my focus here is the equally mystifying modern usage of "virtual."
Back to the dictionary- there are three broad definitions of "virtual":
1: Historical use: "Almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition : the troops stopped at the virtual border." Virtual borders are not official borders on a map, but de facto borders, determined by use.
Note: Only definition #1 clearly references the historic usage of virtue, retained in our word "virtuous," meaning "exhibiting virtues." In the example above, virtual borders have the "virtue" of being observed by practice, though not the virtue of being indicated on maps.
2: In Computing: "Not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to exist, e.g., a virtual doorway;" In other words, imaginary.
3: Physics: "Denoting particles or interactions with extremely short lifespans and indefinitely great energies, postulated as intermediates in some processes." That is, particles, or things, that exist for such a brief period of time that their reality as things is questionable.
One might think that virtual reality derives from definition #3, since it is the most confusing. Does the length of time that something exists have bearing on the reality of its existence? In galactic time, humans do not exist very long. Does that mean ours is a lesser existence? That subject will have to wait for another essay, however, since virtual reality derives from #2, which means, as noted, imaginary.
[Note: I'm going to leave the definition of "reality" as "things that are real," a cop-out perhaps because Merriam-Webster informs us that "reality" derives from the Sanskrit for "property," something to do with "wealth and goods" being real things- a philosophical question for another essay.]
Under virtual reality we get: "The computer-generated simulation of a three-dimensional image or environment that can be interacted with in a seemingly real or physical way by a person using special electronic equipment, such as a helmet with a screen inside or gloves fitted with sensors."
The question I ask at this point is, why do we need to conceive of computer-generated simulation as a type of reality? We never had that need with novels, plays or movies. Those are not types of realities. They are imaginary.
In modern, media based culture, we seem to have concluded that reality is manufactured by us. We get support for this notion from TV news. If the news show we watch shares our bias, our brain allows the television to hook-up with its perceptual apparatus, as a sort of adjunct brain, at least mine does. When I watch a TV news report from a war front on a station matching my bias, my mind gravitates towards belief. If I watch a story on a station that does not match my bias, I am skeptical. In a twist on "confirmation bias," my brain is requiring that its perception of reality be moderated by outer mechanisms that match its bias, in other words that reality be manufactured.
In addition to the news, we have "reality shows." These are shows in which people behave in stage-managed ways, realistic, as far as I can parse the usage, only in the sense that the behavior is real on the show that manufactures it.
One could defend this new definition of reality as manufactured by pointing out that unlike past ages when, for example, young men recruited for the Crusades were told that various events were happening in the Holy Land that required invasion, those events were held to be real, not virtually real. So our culture, by holding that an event can be credited that is only virtually real though not necessarily really real, admits a pervasive doubt into our discourse, and doubt is a virtue.
But the extended context is not so hopeful- it suggests that we don't require actual reality from our media, that it is enough to produce simulated, virtual reality, as video games do.
It is in this context that I consider ISIS, which, in 2014, with its professionally produced, ready for prime time video of a Jordanian pilot burning to death in a cage, realized the predictions of numerous science fiction novels, from the media-mediated wars of George Orwell's 1984 to the blurred lines between war and mass entertainment in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games. On the day the ISIS video was released, ABC national news anchor David Muir described its "high production values," adding that, "No Hollywood studio could have done better," as if he were delivering a movie review. In a sense he was.
The other day a friend showed me a video from a source on the Internet that purported to be a recording of the transmission from a U.S. drone that was conducting an attack on ISIS ground troops in Syria who were attacking the Peshmerga (Kurdish enemies of ISIS, thus our allies). It was a nighttime attack, the ground troops glowing white through infrared lenses. The chatter from drone control, which was hundreds or thousands of miles from the scene, was dispassionate but engaged, technical, referencing targets and coordinates, ordering rocket and 30mm fire that resulted moments later in white flashes where running forms had been. It looked exactly like a video game. I could have been pounding my thumbs blasting aliens or Kazakhs (a favorite game foe for a while). Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game comes to mind, in which hot-shot 9th grade gamers are told by the military that they are trying out a new training video, while they are in fact fighting real aliens (Spoiler alert: Book III reveals that the "invading" aliens were on a peaceful mission).
What do these musings have to do with the real ISIS? I should add that my point is not that ISIS is not real. It's hard to see how its actions could be faked. A man really was burned; people were really beheaded; many European and American cities were really terrorized by fanatics. I'm talking about the sober thinking behind ISIS, specifically their marketing department, and they clearly have one. The War of ISIS is packaged for young men the way a video game would be packaged. Consider how you'll be watching a TV show that young people also watch, and suddenly there's a commercial for a video game showing CGI heroes blasting a variety of monsters, titled maybe End of Doom Part III! Now it's Return of ISIS- The Reckoning!
Commentators have wondered where ISIS comes from and what it wants. It is not a country, or associated with one. It has no past as an established enemy. But its genesis in no secret. ISIS formed in reaction to persecutions of Iraqi Sunnis by U.S. imposed Shia leaders, after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq that toppled Sunni leader Saddam Hussein. ISIS was in effect born of U.S. policy, continuing the pattern of post-World War II conflicts in which we indulge our need to fight enemies by creating them- as we do with video games.
In other words, ISIS is not entirely real. Virtually, though, it's real enough. It certainly has no problem with ratings, though ISIS is at heart a transitory organization, dependent on outside support. On its own it does not have the staying power of a profitable video game. The best outcome would be to win this war quickly, as well as virtually and really.
[Update, 11/4/23: The Israel/Hamas war, like the war against ISIS, is both real and virtual. In America its reality is bolstered because many people instantly identify with one side or the other, and because people on both sides are maimed and killed. The virtual parts are the competing storylines of the conflict's background, such that someone new to the subject could read all the facts in the opposing accounts and come away with no idea what to think, because the same facts, accepted by each side but filtered through different perspectives, support antithetical narratives and draw antithetical conclusions. Undecided Americans will be overruled by the passion and argumentation of those who are sure of their connection to the conflict. Contrast this with Ukraine vs. Russia, which takes a back seat now because it does not grab us the same way. But it will not stay in the back seat for long. There is too much invested in Ukraine vs. Russia to let it go, but how can it compete with Israel vs. Hamas? Since nuclear threat is probably the only way to stimulate American interest in Ukraine vs. Russia, don't be surprised by a nuclear crisis stemming from the war, especially in light of Russian President Vladimir Putin's statement that he is storing tactical nukes in Belarus near the Ukrainian border and may use them against Ukraine.]
[Update, 3/23/24: The implication of the essay above is that ISIS is something of a fabrication. That's an important question considering the horrific attack of 3/22/24 on concert-going civilians in Russia, for which a putative ISIS took credit. The question becomes: If ISIS is a historically disconnected, fabricated entity, who controls it? What are its goals? The answers seem to change from theater to theater. In the case of the recent attack on Russian civilians, Russia says the attack was directed by Ukraine, with no reference to ISIS. Hamas says that Israel and the CIA directed the attack through ISIS. The U.S. says that ISIS is an independent terrorist group that committed the attack independently, as proven by its claiming to have done so. The "facts" on all sides are as antithetical to each other as the "facts" on either side of Israel vs Hamas, or Ukraine vs. Russia. This is purposeful. We are not supposed to understand what's going on, but it's clear what's going on: Current civilization is under threat of being dismantled, sometimes by violent covert or overt forces, sometimes by you and me as we grumble and gripe our way through life, calling incessantly for change and improvement. I don't recommend total pessimism, but to avoid it we need available venues where things can be described and discussed as they are, to save us from intellectual suffocation and to keep some hope alive.]
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
The mother of necessity
Reckless and random the cars race and roar and hunt us to death like bloodhounds.
From The Waves by Virginia Woolf
If you open any book by scientist and historian Jared Diamond to any page, you will find something fascinating, like this from page 291 of Guns, Germs and Steel:
In 1905, motor vehicles were still expensive, unreliable toys for the rich. Pubic contentment with horses and railroads remained high until World War I, when the military concluded that it really did need trucks. Intensive postwar lobbying by truck manufacturers and armies finally convinced the public of its own needs and enabled trucks to begin to supplant horse-drawn wagons in industrialized countries. Even in the largest American cities, the changeover took 50 years.
This passage should be a revelation to anyone born after World War II. No one alive today remembers a time when the public did not believe itself attracted to an unsustainable culture of cars and trucks, bringing constant noise, pollution, speed for its own sake, vast injury and death. We don't remember this skepticism about internal combustion based personal vehicles because the memory has been aggressively erased by various forms of media and propaganda, such as advertising and movies.
In World War II, Diamond further discusses, the US spent $20 billion developing the atomic bomb- possibly the worst idea in human history- because of a perceived necessity of beating Hitler to it.
Diamond calls these modern practices a reversal of the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention;" rather they show that "invention can be the mother of necessity."
Diamond's examples also highlight the role that war plays in creating necessity. The process is something we should ponder now as rumblings of war increase. How might coming conflagrations enable introduction of new technologies? At first glance, it does not seem that the likely interested parties need to use war to create a necessity for their products. The general public is already enamored with computers, the Internet, cell phones, social media, AI and robots- already believing that they need these things. But most people do not believe that they need to be displaced by machines from anything you could call "employment." AI, even in its early stages, appears potentially able to perform any human job. Many people would prefer to keep their jobs, using the income to purchase AI's products. War could overrule that preference. For instance, if war creates a shortage of doctors, people who are averse to a robotic doctor will go to one if that is the only option. A generation later no one will remember a need for human doctors. It's hard to think of a profession that is not susceptible to such "automation," as we used to call it.
The world's political systems are no help, being more tuned in to a quick buck than philosophical questions about the nature of future humanity. To briefly digress: While watching President Biden's recent State of the Union address, I was distracted from weighty questions by the exagerrated public concern about Biden's age, since I am only three years younger. As millions of viewers mercilessly scrutinized him, looking for slips of the tongue or body, Biden seemed in reasonable control. I don't know how many people could stand up there at any age and give such a performance. On the other hand, to return to our subject, Biden, his party and the opposition party (and certainly its leader) are utterly disconnected from the evolutionary atom bomb- millions of years of evolution compressed into one or two generations- that will write our future. As the public comes to recognize that disconnect, we will have an electorate that votes only to keep the other side from winning, but has nothing to vote for.
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If we want to affect our fates, we will need a new political force, whether we call it a "party" or something else. Otherwise our species as we've known it will believe it necessary to exit the scene.
Saturday, February 03, 2024
Ushuaia, the end of the world?
Predicting the end of the world is tricky, considering that, from the Book of Revelations on, all the predictions have been wrong. Or have they? It depends on what you mean by, "the end."
I'm writing from Ushuaia, Patagonia, where signs around town proclaim it "the end of the world" in the sense that it's the southernmost city on Earth, from which both ancient inhabitants and recent Europeans could not establish themselves further south towards the real end, Antarctica.
Patagonia, with its stark beauty, inspires me to consider that our major civilizations up north are coming to an end in another sense: Modern governments, in two areas fast becoming critical to human existence, do not represent their citizens' interests in a democratic fashion. This is not to say that there aren't elements of democracy in the world, for instance in the current US national election voters enjoy some representation with familiar campaign issues like immigration and abortion. But as important as these issues are, they are not as important as the following two questions- stemming from foreign and tech policy- neither of which has the status of campaign issue:
1. Will our children and grandchildren inherit a habitable planet, or one turned into a toxic wasteland by nuclear war? As the next post (Kissinger's nuclear war) suggests, this question will be decided with zero input from citizens at large. On the question of nuclear war, it will not matter whom or what you vote for, or even if you vote.
2. What sort of humans will we become as the species takes charge of its own evolution with emerging technologies in AI and biology? In one hundred years or less we may not be recognizable as human in the currrent sense. Scientists, the military and business interests are driving our evolution. No influence on the process is available to voters in the 2024 US national election or any other election in the world.
This lack of representation may not seem worth any agitation at the moment, but its impact will be in our faces soon enough, compounded and confused by a spreading international culture of warfare. The existential transformations about to envelop us in what future evolutionary historians might call the Cyber-Bio Event (CBE) should already be presented by mainstream media as equally as critical to our imminent future as immigration and abortion, or the Israel/Hamas and Russia/Ukraine wars. But don't expect that to happen soon.
What to do? Options are limited without widespread recognition by the electorate that the CBE will entail more than new AI toys and servile robots. Its impact on our species will be like millions of years of evolution compressed into a few generations- an atom bomb of evolution- and no one knows the outcome.
When or how public recognition of the situation might happen is unclear, but it will happen, and at that time people will want to be protected from out-of-control change, and they might also want to have a hand in creating the new type of human that we will become. Where will they be able to turn politically? If the Democratic and Republican parties have survived ideological bankruptcy in the 2024 nation election and want to get into the act, hopefully they'll have policy ideas to address the CBE beyond used-up labels like "left" vs. "right." We'll need a party focussed on what sort of species we will be. If such a party is not forthcoming, we might turn to groups outside established politics that can exert media and other pressures sufficient to produce a response to the realities approaching (as suggested below in Party or Foundation? and Gaian Mentalics Unite!). Such a group could be enabled by scientists who care and thinkers in general- a billionaire or two wouldn't hurt. Let's not end so easily.