[This is the second part of a two-part essay. If you haven’t yet already, be sure to check out Tether, Part I]

II.

For as long as I can remember I’ve questioned the nature of reality. As a kid, this was not the stuff of idle daydreams, or precociousness, which is just to say my purpose here is not to brag that I was an especially good student. In the first place, I wasn’t, and anyway the sensation I experienced was never one of learning. What I felt was more disquieting than that, and sometimes even frightening, as none of my questions about the world could be answered in a way that satisfied my curiosity. Chief among them: how does this — reality — exist? How, from nothing, does existence exist?

And what is this?

People often laugh at existential questions, the implication being that they’re silly, or childish. Existential conversations are generally perceived as frivolous, and intellectually self-indulgent. An image comes to mind of college students smoking weed, and having “deep” conversations. “The universe is crazy, man.” But the ongoing existence of reality actually is kind of crazy, man, and growing up I genuinely had a hard time understanding how this was not a thing people sat around discussing all day. With no meaningful sense of our origin, how could anyone focus on anything else?

By the late 1990s, just as the internet came of age, writers in Hollywood began to wonder the same thing. From the Truman Show to the Matrix, American cinema began seriously, and lucratively exploring the fundamental nature of reality. Science-fiction lovers remember Blade Runner as one of the great cinematic achievements of our time, but with a forty million dollar box office it barely broke even in 1982. Fifteen years later, America was online, and there was a market for the deeply, unapologetically existential. The internet was a virtual world of information, and any exposure to the medium begged an ancient question long forgotten in the modern age: what even is all this? In gazing into a primitive simulation of reality, we couldn’t help but wonder at the nature of our own — “the real world.” Was it really real? How real? Strangely, what followed was not an interest in tools to help ground us, or to better understand the nature of our world, but something much more like the opposite. For the next twenty years, technologists and consumers would relentlessly pursue a blurring of reality.

We’ve come a long way from photoshopping dinosaurs and aliens into our family pictures, and the complete, cultural normalization of Facetuning entirely new features onto Instagram models is barely the tip of this unreal iceberg. From artificially-intelligent chat bots diligently working toward the world of Her to the generation of lifelike humans from what could be an alternate universe and the advent of deep fake technology in audio and video, an entire generation of machines is being architected explicitly with the purpose of confusing the concept of what is true. In a culture where we already can’t agree on the basic facts of what is real, our tools in development seem almost designed to further erode common ground. We are approaching a world more chaotic and divisive than we can even imagine.

Academic postmodernism has mainstreamed the “critical” lens, and the positively digital notion that subjective experience is objective reality. But we have many new cults worth exploring. Is it really a surprise, for example, so many of us now believe we’re living inside of a video game?

The simulation hypothesis goes something like this:

1) If the ability to architect elaborate, perfect simulations of reality is technologically possible, on a long enough time horizon such technological achievement is almost certainly inevitable.

2) A civilization capable of creating simulated realities would almost certainly create hundreds of thousands or even millions of such simulations.

3) A simple question of odds: is it more likely we are living in the single “real” universe where simulated realities will eventually be invented, or is it more likely we are living in one of the millions or possibly billions or trillions of simulations that will, eventually, exist?

What if our “real world” was an illusion?

“You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

As the presidency of our nation’s most famous reality television star finally draws to a close, I find myself wanting to address a longly-held intrusive thought: has our simulation broken?

I’ve probably always been a little too taken by the “theory” of simulation, which is really just a thought experiment. My difficulty is, if I accept the premise that human potential is boundless, which I do, it seems there is a very, very (very, very, very) good chance our reality is an elaborate simulation. But a simulation of what, and for what purpose?

A handful of years ago, in Citizen Sim, I suggested historical simulations might be among the most popular in a world where the technology to simulate life existed. In the context of our own “reality,” imagine being born into a simulation of Colonial-era America. In such a world, you could “live” the Revolutionary War rather than read about it. Carrying the thought a little further, what momentous history have we recorded in our own time? The Cold War comes to mind.

What if our entire “world” were an elaborate, digital recreation of human history following the end of World War II and concluding with the collapse of the Soviet Union? Maybe beings entered, unbeknownst to us, in order to observe this futuristic peoples’ answer to a PhD in history, or to Disney World. Maybe a few people were born into the simulation, to truly experience the past, and to wake up after their simulated deaths in 1989 in some future techno-Heaven. But the Cold War concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. If the purpose of our simulation were to follow this very specific conflict, hypothetically speaking, what would happen to the simulation, and all of us — the simulated beings — after the simulation’s concluding chapter? Does our star explode?

Do our lights just… go out?

It’s a challenging, frightening moral question. But I have to believe a civilization advanced so technologically as it is capable of simulating entire realities would not have survived without some very strong sense of what is right and wrong. Would an advanced people of unfathomable energy and ability choose to turn a simulation off at its concluding chapter, and end the life of every simulated being it contained? Or would it choose instead to let a simulation run along forever, if with no further attention to details? The latter scenario, in which we are allowed to carry on, seems as likely to me as any other. But in this scenario, after we served our purpose, I imagine we would still be forgotten.

Absent the attention from some benevolent, technological custodians, might errors in our “reality” begin to appear? With no reason to fix them, might such errors proliferate? In such a manner, over time, and compounding, might our world begin to appear… weird? Imagine the rapid generation of strange new language customs, and identities. Imagine the world itself suddenly paused, in the middle of a pandemic — the details of which changed day-to-day, for months, never really adding up. Imagine your president were a professional clown.

Imagine, for a moment, the casual appearance of UFOs.

This all sounds crazy, but “crazy” is the word we use for thinking that seems to be untethered from “reality.” The essential implication here being there’s a single, shared reality in the first place, constructed of some single set of facts we all agree on. But no such set of facts exists. Not anymore. Right?

Conversations about the nature of reality among people with wildly different perspectives, and all of them with “facts” they found online, absolutely certain of the truth, is our future. The proliferation of knowledge cults, and many of them in ferocious conflict, is our future. The reshaping of our “real world” to mirror the internet is our future. Is the notion that our reality may be simulated really “crazy?”

Is it more or less crazy than the last twelve months?

If you’re still reading, my sense is some of this is sounding possible. But at the scale of eight billion people, with every one of us believing something fundamentally untethered from “reality” is possible, are you not a little bit concerned?

III.

Hermes, Orpheus, Gulliver. Jack the Giant Killer, Dorothy of Oz.

For as long as there’s been a collective sense of reality, our greatest mythological heroes have exited the “real” world and journeyed to fantastical new dimensions on quests for wealth and glory, for god and country, for family and for love. The notion that great things exist beyond tradition, and routine, and the realm of the socially acceptable is not new. The impulse to explore new worlds, to ascend the heavens and bring fire back to earth, is ancient and primal. It is also good. With no impulse to challenge and reshape ourselves, human life would never have evolved beyond the primitive. Our lives would be short, and painful, and life itself, of which human beings are the only known custodians, would be doomed to extinction on our tiny planet. But a Wonderland that exists on top of our reality, that all of us enter daily, is very new. It therefore presents new challenges as well as opportunity.

How do we navigate such a world? In this, our mythical heroes have provided some direction. To begin, no one journeys through the underworld without a sword to protect himself, and a lantern to light the way. The canon is both.

If you don’t have access to a library consisting of the canon, with historical and literary texts dated back at least before the turn of the new century and the beginning of our present re-writing of reality, you are marching through our new world blind and unprotected. Buy an old encyclopedia, and an old dictionary, or go pick up a library card. For any contemporary conversation on a dated topic, you must be able to confidently reference back to what was considered true a few years or even just a few hours earlier. The binding of print in leather and wood doesn’t make a piece of information true, but it does provide a reference point in time and space, like a breadcrumb in the forest. From a string of such reference points we can orient ourselves in a fundamentally confusing environment.

The knowledge handed down to us by generations past may be wrong, in details here and there, and we should be open to changing our perspective on the past. But we absolutely have to know when the past is being changed. There are technological solutions for baking some element of permanence into digital information technology, but permanence isn’t the nature of the digital world, as physicality is not the nature of fantasy. Change, challenge, and abundance are the nature of the digital world. Even where it’s possible, technologically, to create permanent records online, such records will be immersed in a rapidly-changing information landscape. As such, the most permanent-seeming digital records may never be fully trusted. I’m not even sure they should be trusted.

Tools for tracking time online are helpful, as would be warnings of budding, information-induced mass hysterias, which is something I’ve argued previously in an essay called Jump. It is critical we develop alerts for sudden, very large-scale shifts in thinking, and new information generated in such moments must be read with extreme caution and skepticism. But here we enter the realm of culture.

We need to normalize the assumption that everything we read online is a little bit wrong, and a single source is never enough. If you find a video clip enraging, corroborate the clip with another, then look for further context — from someone you don’t like. We need to normalize bias checks, and an acceptance of the fact that not only are we living in a funhouse mirror world of distortions and lies and spectacular wonders alike, but that we are drawn to what we already believe, and new belief tends to engender fanaticism. Reminding people of this is not an insult. In a fantasy world, reality checks should come as greetings. They should be polite, casual, and constant. They should be like “God be with you,” and maybe as religious. “Remember where you are right now, remember that this isn’t real.” But most importantly, we have to normalize the act of coming home.

No mythological journey through unreality concludes until the hero returns, or fails in this attempt, because the point is always to come home. The journey was only ever worth the risk because there were people home we loved — our tether.

A few years ago I dreamt I was in space, outside my ship, repairing a hull breach. Disaster struck, and I was thrown into the darkness. There I drifted away from my ship, with no way back. With no one aware of what had happened, I knew that I would drift like that for hours. I would drift like that for days. No rope or chord to the ship, no wire. No tether home. I was going to die. This, more than anything, is what I remember of the dream — acceptance of the fact that I would die, and I would die alone. In the silence. In the black. I became calm.

But then I became lucid. I remembered I was dreaming, and that was the way home. The trick is remembering that: the internet is a world of facts scattered in the noise, of course, but also, and perhaps mostly, it is a world of illusion. Check your books for reference, and check your biases. And for God’s sake get off Twitter, and go for a walk.

Remember that.

It’s time to come home.

-SOLANA