Soul not Simulation
It’s become fashionable of late to theorize that we are living inside a simulation.
The theory seems extracted from pop culture—the Matrix and its analogs ignited the flame for this particular pop science mind masher (a mind masher is a pink neuron-activated version of a tongue twister); but, the gas was already pumping in 1983 with Baudrillard’s "Simulacra and Simulation", an inscrutable, florid graduate-student Ur-text popular among Yale-educated artists in the 90s. We should have smelled it and turned off the burners.
By the time Elon Musk, everyone’s favorite misogynistic multi-billionaire (I heard recently — shh, don’t spread this rumor — that Elon’s infamous “Tesla sale confirmed at $420, funding secured” tweet happened during an all-night LSD bender with Grimes and Azelia Banks), by the time Elon went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and said “games will eventually be indistinguishable from reality, so, we’re most likely in a simulation,” you can be sure that this pop-science edict had weaseled its way from the nu-theoretical fringes to occupying a central role in the mainstream hivemind ceaselessly propounded by leading architects of thought (podcasters, tech billionaires, venture capitalists, academic leaders, artists, game-show hosts, musicians, fashion designers, Jim Cramer, etc.)
The problem of course is that the Universe as Simulation idea is in its face absurd. Worthy of Reddit’s “Shower Thoughts,” perhaps, but it is not something leading intellectuals ought to be concerned with. My old housemate, a prolific keta-mixologist user, came home one day and said, “bro I just snorted sooo much ketamine, I feel like I’m living in a video game.” Yes, it seems that the whole of Western intellectual leaders gathered together, bringing their best and brightest, and came up with… the same idea you get after snorting a healthy mound of horse tranquilizer.
More likely it is the other way around. The pervasive feeling of disassociation in late 20th century America transformed from acute sensory perception to academic, theoretical royalty. It’s not that we are living in a simulation. It’s that our actions and choices in Post-Modern America1 feel so drearily prescribed that we, as a society, prefer to cage and lock up the inexplicability of the universe into a batch of deterministic computer code rather than face what is sure to stir up seething discontent — that America, by 1946 rewarded with the keys to the kingdom, constructed a world that looks, smells, tastes, sounds and feels as much as anything like a computer simulation.
We simply cannot bear that, amidst all the infinite possibilities of nature, all the dank complexity of God and fractals, this is what we’ve come up with. Hours a day staring at a four-inch screen. Lifeless steel and glass rectangles built higher and wider. One hundred years after Walter Gropius cultivated the concept of “Modern Architecture” with a school of young German men, we find ourselves living amongst an endless morass of cold, meaningless boxes. Cathedrals these are not. Is it any surprise that this culture, living in these buildings, looking at this art, listening to this music, would be drawn to the idea that human beings are nothing more than units of electrical circuitry?
Growing up, one of my favorite computer games was The Sims. It wasn’t the game-play specifically that attracted me, but the way you could create characters and architecture. Call it Identity Making — this was what I was focused on, and I intuitively loved it. I spent hours designing grand homes with brick exteriors and every possible rug and carpet combo I could find. If I ran out of options there were expansion packs and cheat-codes I could use to get new materials, furniture, clothing, etc. One time my brother, in a fight, deleted the saved file for my most recent grand mansion. I cried and wailed— Oh, how I had built out the gardens and the pool and the walkways and the many, many doors! Oh sweet mercy, please, anything but my Sims mansion!!
Little did I know that the Sims was more than a game, it was a prototype for modern living. I was born in 1993. In the time since, the making of our identities has become ever and evermore central to success or failure in business and in life. Prestige is not handed down by family crest or dictated by Church or State; it is meted out in follows and likes in viscous fits and starts on social media. Step wrong—as Kanye West did in the last two weeks with his anti-semitic remarks—and watch your business lines dry up, your friends condemn you, and the public exile you.
To be clear, I don’t care how Kanye gets punished for his antisemitism; in this case, it seems like the punishment fits the crime. But consider how the same dynamics that West operates within (he does it with exceptional clarity towards how to exploit the system for money and attention), consider how these social dynamics are replicated at different scales, from entire industries to academic institutions to social groups to families, each of them a kind of social network arbitrated by Go/No-Go links indicating Up/Down social statuses; the collection of which accounts for our prestige and positioning within a social hierarchy. The dominant culture, left and right, agree fervently that identity is the main stage for reality: according to this worldview, how we present our identity matters most, not just as a signal to those in our bodily vicinity but as an action-step. Wearing the wrong clothing or expressing the wrong set of ordered sounds radiates outwards in a hyper-connected system that, it should be noted, is recording each and every expression. Later, a constellation of corporate giants will review these expressions, build for each of us a computer profile, find our most likely immediate financial outlays, and target us with advertisements to secure an expedient flow of funds to these outlays.
Concerned with the nuances of personal identity this world is not. Identity has always been a slippery idea; who we are in one situation is never who we are in another. The meaning and truth of a person’s soul is far more interesting. But seeking the soul of things is not fashionable. Instead, we gaze ever deeper into the soul of the computer — trying desperately to find meaning in 90° angles, a god arising from symmetrical electrical flow. Not realizing that what we really seek, we’ve had in us all along.
Post-Modernism refers only to the lapse of its predecessor and says nothing about what the present ought to be about.