Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Covid after Covid

Episode Date: May 25, 2022

One million plus dead Americans into the pandemic and the ‘long covid’ odds are now 1 in 5. What happened? How did we end up here? And more importantly, how does one win the covid lottery? Our two favorite stories from our ‘NYC after covid’ mini series from last year.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called COVID After COVID. When COVID happened, it just pulled the rug out from under all of us, I feel like. I don't mind telling you, I went to a really dark place. It was so hard. David is a New York City-based theater director. A couple of years ago, we did a story about his remake of Rent. Curiously, the same producer behind that masterpiece reached out to David during the lockdown with a proposition to get back to work. I really, I rethought my whole thing, my whole gestalt. And I was like, if theater comes back, if it deserves to come back, it's going to have to that really that really brings us together by embodying risk you know by like really like the stuff that we've really been feeling so that that's kind of where i'm at and weirdly enough that guy from rent calls me and is like

hey would you consider working together again and i was like i don't know man i'm i'm pretty done with theater you know i kind of broke my heart. And he's like, well, I've still got the rights to the stage adaptation of the Shirley Jackson biography. And they scooped me on the movie. And Elizabeth Moss from The Handmaid's Tale played Shirley Jackson. And it was a pretty big indie hit, but I've still got the Broadway rights. So I'm thinking maybe we can do a musical version.

And I'm like, I think I have a better idea. And he's like, what? And I was like, well, what if we did a musical adaptation of the most responded to New Yorker story ever written? And he says, Cat Prison? And I'm like, no! of the most responded to New Yorker story ever written. And he says, cat person? And I'm like, no, it's The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, the woman whose bio rights you own. Why don't we do a musical version of that? And I sort of talk him through it

and I talk him through the themes. It's like a little bit of hillbilly elegy, a little bit of wicker man, a little bit of fly over country, forgotten voters. So you got the Trump angle, but then at the same time, it's really a community coming together, sacrificing. And he's like, okay, great. whatever you want I love you baby you're a genius glad to be working together again and suddenly here I am the guy who no longer believes in theater getting to make a piece of theater he believes in so I started off trying to imagine the opener you know and I was imagining this sort of very big percussive intro, you know, where you sort of meet all the characters.

Because everyone knows how it ends, everyone knows the lottery, so you don't need to worry about the exposition, exactly. It's like Romeo and Juliet, you know? And so I just imagined like, you know, this like, lot of drums. Cast the first stone, cast the first stone. Who's going to cast the first stone? Different characters can kind of step forward and be introduced, like it's a Twin River Anthology or something, but it's also like Sweeney Todd.

It's like, cast the first stone. It's our town. Cast the first stone. Who's going to cast the first stone? It's like, who am I to judge, right? Who am I to judge? But also that's literally what happens in the lottery, and that's like a real way of introducing you to the community

and its own sort of rituals around judgment and justice right which which which have the same root judgment and justice the thing that seems so appalling in the lottery was the idea that these that these sacrifices could still go on now. They could go on in a supposedly enlightened country. And the reason they definitely would go on in a supposedly enlightened country was because the sacrifice is necessary to keep the economy going. And we're used to this myth

with agrarian kind of stuff. And sure, it's an agrarian community you know in the lottery but what was crazy during covid was these governors and these like you know soi-disant patriots you know down texas or florida being like if i have to sacrifice grandma to keep the economy going so be it and i was like oh that's it that's the lottery but not for crops it's the lottery for capitalism so I think the major really the major theme of this piece now is is sacrifice because we're all sacrificing it's not one particular person's right one person you know one particular person doesn't win the right to sacrifice we're all sacrificing. It's not one particular person's right. One person, you know, one particular person doesn't win the right to sacrifice. We're all sacrificing, you know, and so I felt it was

really important to show that through the casting, which is why I decided to cast only unvaccinated actors. We're going to do this immersively. We're going to take a page from Sleep No More, right? If you really want people to feel the risk of the community in the lottery, they have to feel the risk of the community at the theater. You don't need to draw the associations. You feel the danger right there. I mean, those little stones, those little stones that the kids are gathering, those are aerosolized droplets. There's piles of little stones already in the air around you.

Who's going to win the lottery? Who's going to get COVID? Who's responsible? Who's not? Who's playing it safe? Who's scared? Who's willing to sacrifice for the community? The big reveal, the big reveal is going to be not only are we not checking vaccination status, not only are we not requiring masks, the big reveal at the very end is that none of the cast is vaccinated. They're all singing at you. You know they're passing through the audience bellowing out, why did it have to be me? Spraying aerosolized, unvaccinated breath droplets over everyone. Why did it have to be me?

I want to leave it as a question. Who won the lottery? Who lost? Who's going to get COVID? Did they deserve it? Did they have the right attitude towards it? And we're not going to get COVID? Did they deserve it? Did they have the right attitude towards it? And we me? We thank you for your sacrifice. Oh, why, why'd it have to be me?

Why did it have to be me? I was doing my part for the community. Oh, why, why, why did it have to be me? Why did it have to be me? If this pandemic wasn't enough of a wake-up call that we're not doing it right, I don't know what else we should be waiting for. Benjamin Bratton is the author of Revenge of the Real, a new book that attempts to make sense of how and why

the West systemically failed in its response to the pandemic. The book is not all doom and gloom, though, because for Benjamin Bratton, the pandemic also illuminates a way forward. Our ability to address these kinds of issues, and we do have the ability to address these kinds of issues, we absolutely do, is dependent upon a kind of disenchantment or at least a demystification of our understanding of what the real is and how it is that it makes us possible and how it is that we can intervene in it. So I figured out where I stood on surveillance pretty early on. I wouldn't say I was ever a member of the big tech resistance, but I was definitely opposed to the idea of companies

like Facebook and Google getting more data or even access to more data, especially if the data would come from sensors embedded in the public realm, parks and streets. But reading your book has really forced me to rethink some of these positions. And even more importantly, it's got me wondering if perhaps I was just wrong, like from the beginning. Let me back up a sec and say that when I talk about how it is that societies might be capable of public reason, that means how a society is able to know itself, make sense of itself on a holistic and granular level to produce models of itself so that it can act back upon itself in a way that is effective. That doesn't mean just big data. That doesn't mean just sensors. It doesn't just mean

quantification, but it can't exclude those things in order for us to really expect for this capacity for collective self-organization to occur. If we think about the emergence of planetary scale computation over the last 50 years, and by that I mean all of the satellites and sensors and data centers and undersea cables and the billions of mobile phones that we carry around with us, just the emergence of computation, not as a type of object that's a computer, but as a massive planetary scale infrastructure. We've used that for lots of different things. One of the primary uses for this to date has been global advertising and the modeling and indeed surveillance and prediction of the behaviors of individual people and users. I would argue that this is a kind of world historical misuse of a fundamental technology.

But we've also used it for other kinds of things such as climate science. The very idea of climate change, the very concept of climate change itself is an epistemological accomplishment of planetary scale computation. Without the capacity to sense and make sense and model all of these complex planetary systems through this massive infrastructural apparatus, an accidental megastructure, I call it, the very idea of climate change wouldn't be possible. And so the lesson to be drawn is then, okay, how can we think about this question of how societies sense and model and make sense of themselves in ways that look more like climate

science and look less like global advertising? I just want to make it absolutely clear. I'm not arguing for more surveillance of individuals. I'm arguing for a shift in the logic of social sensing and modeling away from the individual, away from the prediction of consumer behavior and towards the things that really matter. Yeah, I don't think it's unclear what you're arguing. I just think that it's also important to note that, you know, platforms like Facebook and Google, they never say things like we need more data to make more money on digital ads. They say things like we need more data to make the world a safer and better place, whether it be through, you know, social networks or smart cities that they want to offer. And, you know, I've never fallen for, you know, that kind of talk. But post-pandemic, it has become totally clear that we can't have it both ways.

We can't demand things like test and trace and at the same time denounce all forms of sensing and data collection as police surveillance. We just can't. And so, yeah, I think your argument is totally clear, but it's the pandemic that's made, you know, at least me, more open and receptive to your argument. I appreciate your comment. I do. And I think my opinions on the matter were also a little bit closer to where you're describing

yours were. And I am deeply sympathetic to many of the concerns that the kind of anti-surveillance movements have been focused on. But I've come to also depart from them in a certain sense that I think they don't go far enough. The problem is that we're using and constructing the logic and form of society that the platforms are engaging with in relationship to private individuals in the first place. The private human individual and what it is that you or I or anybody else may want to click on next or may want to look at next or shop for next cannot be the base unit of how it is we conceive of not only what a society is, but how it is that we model that society. And so there's a

deep critique of this logic of hyper individualism, not only in the populist response to the pandemic, which we are seeing now, once again, in the anti-mask movement, in the anti-vaccine movement, in the anti-lockdown movement of a kind of a fantastic construction of a kind of mythological individual sovereignty. But we also see it, unfortunately, in the anti-surveillance critique of this, that it's about a fortification of the libertarian individual who has private data. If Facebook has invented anything, it has invented the idea of individual private data, which in an epidemiological context, in the context of the pandemic, that makes no sense. My exhale is your inhale, and your exhale is my inhale.

There's something more fundamental below this, a biochemical epidemiological reality to which we have certain kinds of obligations. The key idea here is that the problem in how we've been using planetary scale computation apparatuses has been a hyper-individuation of the interests of this sensing and modeling. Facebook is the classic example of this. Facebook is broken at a fundamental level because its model of society is as individual, separated, atomic subjects who subsequently enter into semiotic relationships with one another. One of the things the pandemic makes clear is that no, societies are always assemblages. They're always multitudinous. They're always plural. They're always entangled. The book, The Revenge of the Real is arguing

for what I call a positive biopolitics, which simply means an understanding that this modeling and composition and construction of life, the collective organization of life, which includes our health, it includes ecologies, it includes cities, it includes all the ways in which complex heterogeneous forms of life can be cultivated and sustained into the daytime of the future future is not just going to happen by itself. It will require our deepest and most creative forms of compositional reason in order for it to have a chance of succeeding. So you wrote your book as the pandemic was unfolding, like live in 2020 real time. And the main story is of course,

the disastrous response to COVID in the West, of which our current thinking and deployment of technology played a big role as you just laid out. But you also catch the beginning of the response to the response. This is something that's more pronounced now with the anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, and the anything but a vacciners. You jokingly call it at one point the revenge of the revenge of the real, which I really like. But the ferocity and commitment of these movements actually caught me by surprise. Like I was not expecting them to

double down when faced with the reality of COVID. But double down is exactly what they did. Yeah. And this goes hand in hand with the emergence of the populist wave of recent years, is there's a both a legitimate and illegitimate sense that governing institutions are not to be trusted and not the appropriate mechanism for the organization of society, which ends up producing a situation in which you don't have capable, competent governing mechanisms because those capable and competent governing mechanisms were never architected and instantiated. And then when you have a situation in which you really need them, you don't have them, which only in certain sense reinforces people's ideas

that governing responses are incompetent and incapable because they are living through the consequences of the incompetence of a government that they, in a certain sense, their mistrust has put into place. And it becomes a kind of vicious circle in this way. Society is being held hostage by a minority of its population who refuses for political reasons, psychological reasons, theological reasons, all manner of cultural reasons, refuses to engage with the underlying reality that makes their lives possible.

That their sense of the deeply invested narrative that they have about the world is more important than the world that this narrative is supposed to be describing to them. We are at this very strange moment where we have incredible technological capacity. We can produce an mRNA-based vaccine, and Moderna produced their vaccine candidate before the virus ever got to North America. They did it from a digital model that they've been uploaded from China. The vaccine was invented before the virus got to North America. The incredible technological capability on the one hand, absolute social, political, self-owned incompetence on the other hand this contrast between a capacity and capability between our technical capacity and our social and political

capability this is what got us in this place in the first place and whatever we return to has to be based on an understanding that that chasm has to be brought together together. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called COVID After COVID. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Benjamin Bratton and David Levine. Special thanks to the musical genius, Andrew Calloway. It's a remix of two stories from my New York After COVID miniseries

that we did last year. You can find that whole thing at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia from PRX, home to some of the world's best podcasts. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia from PRX.