Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - That was Real (New York After Rona part i)

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

We kick off our new ToE miniseries with a radical rethink on surveillance and the post pandemic city with theorist and writer Benjamin Bratton. His new book Revenge of the Real, both chronicles what went wrong during the crisis and offers a roadmap for how we can survive the next one. Also, your host visits the only New York city neighborhood that has gotten worse after covid, Hudson Yards, with journalist Charlie Warzel. Plus: we look back at one of the first viral videos shot in pandemic time.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called That Was Real. Y'all, this shit is for real, y'all. This is for real. This is for real. This is Brooklyn, y'all. Brooklyn. New York. This is for real, y'all.

March 29, 2020. New York City was on lockdown. A man named John Lee pulled his car over in front of Brooklyn Hospital, took out his phone, and began live streaming. This is for real, y'all. This is for real. Sorry for the camera shaking, but this is for real, y'all. Over the past two weeks, New Yorkers had been pouring into the city's hospitals sick from COVID.

Now they were starting to leave. Don't have room inside the hospital for bodies. They put them in the back of a freezer truck. This is for real. Father God, watch over us. John Lee prays as a red forklift spins and beeps. Orderlies dressed in blue move bodies wrapped in white into a long 18-wheeler.

The streets are slick and the sky is gray. I'm in my car. I got my mask. I got my gloves. But I got my windows up. I'm in my car. But I got to show y'all this. This is for real.

This is for real. This is for real, y'all. I remember exactly when I first watched this video. It was the evening of our 14th day on the island. None of us were sick. I was finally starting to breathe. We didn't catch or bring the virus with us from New York. This is going on right now. This is live, y'all. The time is 10.40, Sunday morning. This is down. This is down. Factoring in the six-hour time difference, I think I watched

John Lee's video in France not too long after he posted it in New York. This is real. This is real. This is real. This is real! I think I felt something similar to what John Lee was feeling. This terrible scene of bodies being forklifted into a freezer truck

surely would bring the naysayers and disbelievers to their senses. Family and friends, make sure you share this. This video is proof that the deaths were real to put the body inside. That COVID was real. Please share this. This is for real.

This is for real. This is for real. This is for real. I'm going back home and lock myself in my house. God bless y'all. I'm going back home. I watched John Lee's video over and over again for hours that night. It was the first time, the first time since the crisis had begun, that I felt something like hope. I actually went to sleep that night convinced that the world was going to come together. By necessity, of course, but still, I went to sleep that night totally convinced that COVID was going to bring the world together.

The other day, I looked up John Lee's original Facebook post. His video had gotten hundreds of comments, mostly on the day that he posted it, March 29, 2020. Shut up, stupid man. Stop repeating yourself. COVID is not real. Shut up, crazy man. Why are you outside if it's so dangerous? This is a false flag. You are a moron. The only thing real is your stupid voice. Shut up. COVID's not real. Shut the hell up. COVID is not real. 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. And 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 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. Like, we can't demand things like test and trace and at the same time, you know, denounce all forms of sensing and data collection as police surveillance. Like, 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 like 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, 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 now 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 deep time of the 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. 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. There's 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 had 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. There's a very real reason as to why I fell sway to the idea that COVID would bring humanity together.

Science fiction. In many of the post-apocalyptic stories that I loved and devoured as a child, the big event, whether it was a meteor or a war or a pandemic, forced humanity to come together and fight for their shared humanity. I realize now these stories played a much larger role in shaping my worldview than I ever understood. They provided me with a sense of ethics and an idea of justice. In the post-apocalyptic stories I read as a kid, the bad guys, the people who cling to the old ways of divisiveness and provincialism, don't survive. In fact, there's almost an implicit promise of punishment, or at least a comeuppance. A recent example, in Lawrence Wright's post-apocalyptic

pandemic novel, The End of October, a novel he wrote just before COVID came on the scene, the Trump-like President of the United States character demands that he and his family get the first doses of the experimental vaccine. And then he bleeds to death on live television. Those first few months of the pandemic were very difficult for me. Nothing I expected to happen happened. COVID tested every single one of my assumptions, my convictions, and my beliefs.

I lost my faith. Like I said, those first few months of the pandemic were extremely difficult. And then, on May 6, 2020, I read something that snapped me out of my trance. It was a piece in the Times by the journalist Charlie Warzel. He made the case that America was on track to normalize the thousands of daily COVID deaths, just as Americans do with the thousands and thousands who die every year from guns. I know it sounds strange to say that this piece brought me comfort, but it did. Like I said, it snapped me out of my trance. And so, when I crossed paths with Charlie Warzel last week at a conference in Hudson Yards,

I decided to thank him. How you doing? Wow, look at you. I know, I'm already rolling too. That's great, you've got the whole setup. I've got the whole thing ready to go. No ink and spigots at all. We met outside, next to the vessel,

Thomas Heatherwick's interactive spiral selfie staircase. It's currently closed to the public. Four people have now jumped from the vessel. And rumor has it, the suicide staircase will never open again. Do you know hudson yards very well no was it did it go up when you were here or are you already gone i i left in 2017 so i think i think it was mostly gone yeah i i actually didn't even know about the all the people throwing themselves off yeah look look this is kind of dark they have to employ a full-time guard to

make sure no one goes in wow that's wild the story that um i heard last night was that is like the only part of it that's like slightly darkly funny was when like there was a rash of people jumping off they were like we should if we're gonna charge like 20 bucks to disincentivize people and it was like i don't know man it was like, I don't know, man. I don't know if money is the issue there. I don't know if you've had this feeling coming back to New York City, but for me being gone 17 months, I have to say there's a lot of neighborhoods in New York

that I think are really improved after the pandemic, except this one. This feels like more of a darker soulless play yeah no i totally feel that way so yeah so i i uh i didn't follow that many people closely during the pandemic but you were kind of one of my guiding stars actually it's so wild that's i mean that's it's very heartening to hear but but also how? How did that happen? I don't know. Maybe just because we have the personal Montana connection, and I love your work. And you were just kind of saying some things early on

that I was really excited that were being said, and I was curious how they would land, one of them being your thoughts about the normalization of deaths. Yeah, so I think that was early May, 2020, and somebody tweeted that, you know, 3,000 people dying a day, like, how is it that we're not, like, overwhelmed with emotion every second, right?

Like, how can that happen? And the only thing that that reminded me of was, like, shootings, right? Where it's like, you have this terrible thing that happens and there's that usually that moment that like mass outpouring of like, oh my god, how could this happen? How could we how could we be living in a society that like tolerates this and then you have to like the human mind just Like like has to shut off at some point that you can't care that much and I just remember thinking like we do, oh, we do, like, we Americans specifically do this with guns. Like, we're going to do it with this, I think.

Before the pandemic, I was doing a lot of the, like, writing about misinformation and propaganda and how online systems, you know, change each other and change us. And I always thought that a lot of these, especially like the political polarization stuff, that like it could be overcome. Like, you know, the stakes for people just weren't high enough yet. It's like eventually there will be a disaster of magnitude

that will help us, kick us out of this and say, okay, this is real. We have to believe this. And in that sense you believe this too i did i think that's why i was when i wrote that piece like i was genuinely really upset about about this fact it's like no this is just going to be what it's like every day so like we do have to just you know weave it into the fabric of our lives. I'm having a hard time doing that. I really am. Like, I think that I'm,

the one thing I'm suffering the most after this last six months is this. How are you doing with it? Yeah, not, not, not good. Truly, like, I mean, I think it just, there's like a nagging, like, sadness about it. I really, I really struggle with it. But I also think, too, you can go, you really i really struggle with it but i also think too

you can go you go two ways with it right you can go the nihilistic route and you can say well it kind of doesn't matter like i i just need to get mine you know like we're only gonna be around here so long and it's gonna get harder and harder and worse feel worse so i might as well make the money i can or whatever and you just live my my life and I don't I understand that rationally like I think at some point you know people do have to do things I think the other way about it is like it's never been more important to try to hang on to that and to try to talk about it and to try to you know I mean like I think I wrote that piece and I'm kind of all the pieces that I've written about the pandemic and that sort of stuff.

To reach out to someone like yourself who's on the other side and sees that too. And it's like, can we just acknowledge what we're doing here? And it's like the smallest piece of comfort, but it also, like, it is comfort, at least for me. That's sort of, I don't know what else I can do other than, you know, have other people see themselves in it, you know. And that's why it's meaningful that you said that, because that's how I was feeling. And I think it helps at least a little bit. It's the tiniest thing to not feel alone. We've got this other big looming crisis, climate change. and I think it helps at least a little bit. It's the tiniest thing to not feel alone.

We've got this other big looming crisis, climate change. And you know how in Peanuts, when Lucy always takes the football away from Charlie Brown, and he keeps falling for it, there's a part of me that wants to revert to my old beliefs that like, okay, the next calamity is going to come along, and we're all going to be in this together. But I'm curious, do you feel like climate change might be different? There's this thing I've thought a lot about with like, what would COVID have been like

if it was, if it looked more like, you know, like say like Ebola, right? Where there's like you're bleeding or like, you know, like where it's viscerally and it's not kept behind closed doors and it's not, you know, would that kind of pandemic have been different? And I, and I, with that, I do the same thing. I think, I just think if, you know, if just, if perhaps we're a little bit, you know, a little bit, I don't know, not, not, not even deadly, just like more visceral, right? If you could, if you could see it more. Not face mask, but like leprosy mask to protect you to like go out and not have people scream at you. Yeah. Or, or if it was, I mean, it's such Not face masks, but leprosy masks to protect you to go out and not have people scream at you. Yeah, or if it was...

I mean, it's such a gruesome, horrible way to die, and yet it's like most people don't know what it looks like or don't see it, and you only get the occasional footage or whatever. You can live your life at a remove from it. So I often have that sort of counterfactual of like, well, what would it have been like? Would it have changed in any way?

And I think that's that hope hanging on. And I think with the climate stuff, I think it is, you know, the disasters are just so visceral. And you experience them and they're easy. They're more, you know, to use it crassly, like telegenic, right? Like they're made for a lot of TV and things like that. And you really do sort of feel it, like, when the wildfire stuff happens out west in Montana. Like, I mean, I have to close all my windows. The sky is sepia.

Like, you smell smoke everywhere. You feel, like, you know, terrible. And so that is radicalizing, I think, and I think it will be for some people, but I don't know, you know, there, there's also a way in which if we're always just going to be reactive to it, then we're always going to be behind. And that's the thing that, that worries me, you know, I mean, you, like, whether it's another coming pandemic or whether it's the climate stuff, like, I mean, the investments that need to be done now, you know, like these things need to happen now.

And that's the one thing that I feel pretty confident is not going to happen. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called That Was Real. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and it featured Benjamin Bratton and Charlie Warzel. Benjamin Bratton's new book is called Revenge of the Real, and Charlie Warzel's newsletter is called Galaxy Brain. This episode is part one in a brand new Theory of Everything miniseries, which is called New York After Rona. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts.

Find them all at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia from PRX