At least, I hope. Barring essential news, like the remote chance of back mutation to a dangerous variant evading herd immunity, we’re done with SARS-CoV-2. There’s still a chance another coronavirus rears its head–SARS-CoV-2 was the latest in a “once a decade: the emergence of SARS, followed by MERS. If that happens, and it’s an -if-, and -if- it looks like it manages to break out, we’ll be back on the coronavirus beat.

Not to worry you, but there is precedent for that. We mentioned before that the Black Death had recurrent waves of plague, as it became endemic after the initial wave in 1346-1348. Epidemics with varying mortality rates would pop up for years (arguably, centuries). For example, the outbreak of 1360-1363 gets less press. The overall mortality rate was a mere 20%, very nearly half of the “original.” But that was the plague wave that disproportionately came for the children, according to contemporary historians. There was another big wave in 1369, with a “mere” 10-15% mortality rate.

And so it went, and thus far, there are hints of a disturbing sine wave function for emergent, highly contagious and severe coronaviruses. So if knowing that over a long enough timeline, even laboratory procedures expected to work 99.999% of the time to prevent the accidental release of a deadly pathogen on any given day are also destined to fail was not enough to convince you gain function studies are a bad idea, maybe natural selection pressure creating intermittent waves of worrisome coronaviruses are.

Yes, this does make a case for continued research–but focusing on these three already nasty strains is probably enough. They have all been similar in how they have been virulent at the molecular level. The best idea will be to have a few solid candidate molecules that, in a test tube, maybe a few animal models, globally disrupt coronaviruses. Acute treatments, since vaccines against these kinds of respiratory viruses are challenging. At least ones that prevent infection AND transmission and where the current coronavirus vaccines eventually underperformed. Scalable production capacity for monoclonal antibody development would also be good to keep in the back pocket as soon as neutralizing antibodies to the emerging strain a decade or so from now are found and can be modified to be produced as medicine. We avoid the risk of creating another SARS-CoV-2 via accident in “gain of function” experiments while, at the same time, keeping enough optionality in acute treatments that worked to respond quickly, efficiently, and effectively with good leads, likely to work against whatever new coronavirus hell may raise its head.

As far as the risk that the next coronavirus is ALSO a pandemic, and we get to do this dance all over again, well… there’s a chance. There will always be a chance. But it’s not the base case, and by a long shot.

In some ways, SARS-CoV-2 becoming a global pandemic took a perfect storm. The initial breakout happened not in a hospital but in the community already, in a densely populated city. The government of that city and country was slow to detect, then slow to react appropriately either through bureaucratic inertia or because the local politics demanded a narrative that the government is right and constantly progressing towards a glorious future. Both were probably important factors. World health authorities were slow to react because the outbreak happened in a country with enough financial and political heft to either stall or encourage an “all under control” narrative when all was not controlled.

But we should not discount normalcy bias. We assumed that in our globalized world, with a level of health care unparalleled in human history, modern science, communication, and travel technology, we were inoculated from global pandemics. More than one person, including some talented fellow physicians, commented to me, in voices of wonder, in tones of mystified shock, that they did not believe a pandemic would actually happen in their lifetimes.

Pandemics were something we read about with morbid fascination. Something from our medieval history books or a dimly remembered fact about the immediate aftermath of World War 1. “Flu could do that? That week of misery I occasionally get every other winter or so?”

The slow reaction, even though I was writing you that “it’s out and it’s going to be global”, was undoubtedly due to the very human doubt that something so far out of the normal could happen.

I was only just confident enough in that call to push “send.” Even I didn’t want to believe it. Of course, there was the fear that I would be wrong and scared you for nothing. I thought there was enough in the early spread data to ultimately err on the side of scaring you.  

If nothing else, when and where I was wrong over these years, I made my calls based on what data was available at the time–and thus believed it, even when later data (like the mutation rate for SARS-CoV-2 and subsequent variants) eventually showed my initial handicapping was off.

So what else have we learned?

–Well, let’s first summarize the pandemic. SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus, one of several families of viruses that cause common cold / upper respiratory / “flu” symptoms. The virus is closely related to the coronaviruses that caused SARS and MERS, which emerged approximately 20 and 10 years before in South East Asia and the Middle East. Both SARS and MERS were recognized early, via an unusually high cluster of severe symptoms and a higher than expected death rate in the severe cases–but both SARS and MERS proved to not be quite contagious enough to escape the quarantines set in place. There is ample reason to believe that SARS-CoV-2 was active in the population of Wuhan, China, by November 2019, based on a sampling of archived clinical material. There is justification to believe SARS-CoV-2’s mutation profile could result from a biological research facility’s activities, which was researching coronaviruses, including “gain of function” research to make more contagious and virulent versions to keep treatment “ahead” of the viruses. There is some evidence to suggest descent from bat coronaviruses and a chance (albeit a slightly less likely one) that SARS-CoV-2 was a natural evolutionary leap from a bat coronavirus. The argument against it is that years later, a reservoir of a convincing close cousin in the bats near Wuhan has not been reported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. SARS-CoV-2 was likely NOT a deliberate “gain of function” virus, nor a bioweapon accidentally released, but most probably resulted from some mix and match of natural and modified viruses in the Wuhan laboratory, which was then accidentally released. Bona fide proof of this will take lab notebooks describing what gain of function viruses were in the Wuhan lab. There is plenty of reason to suspect if that evidence existed, it may not anymore.

The virus is a positively stranded single-strand RNA virus and uses its surface spike protein (later the target of vaccines) to bind to and interact with ACE receptor 2.  

Regardless, SARS-CoV-2 escaped into the general population of Wuhan, China, in late 2019. By Christmas of 2019, spotty news reports reflected a cluster of cases with severe upper respiratory symptoms due to an unknown virus. To their credit, Chinese health authorities quickly identified SARS-CoV-2 as the culprit sequenced the virus, and described the symptom pattern and risk factors for severe disease that survived the test of time. Specifically, those over 65 with underlying heart, lung, immunocompromise, diabetes, and obesity were more likely to have severe disease requiring hospitalization and a higher mortality rate when hospitalized.

The symptom pattern, later termed COVID-19 (Coronavirus Infectious Disease 2019) and shortened to COVID, was an upper respiratory infection with aerosol spread (highest in fall and winter months) that could progress to pneumonia, with symptoms appearing 1 to 14 days after exposure (2-7 days probably most common). Patients were most contagious while symptomatic, and most cases of COVID were self-limited with symptoms of 3-10 days duration (usually 5-7). Patients who were PCR positive for the virus but no longer symptomatic were extremely unlikely to infect additional patients–a fact proven by multiple studies. More specific features included loss of taste and smell, which could precede respiratory symptoms by up to 24 hours, and a mild or worse hypercoagulable state sometimes leading to peripheral anoxia (“COVID toes,” which were digits that turned partially or completely blue, at least temporarily). The hypercoagulable state could persist for up to 6 months after infection, as later studies in the pandemic would demonstrate. COVID-19 also showed a higher risk for myocarditis, especially in teenage to early 20s males, which was typically self-limited and, in most cases, resolved without incident in 3 months. In younger children (12 and under), there was a tendency for GI symptoms, including diarrhea, and the virus could be tracked for epidemiology via wastewater sampling. A Kawasaki-like disease was seen rarely in children under 12 with COVID and in all but a few cases, resolved with standard Kawasaki disease treatments. Severe COVID requires hospitalization for respiratory distress, typically 5-7 days after the onset of symptoms. However, severe COVID cases progressing to ICU treatment and death usually demonstrate sepsis, with multi-organ failure due to the systemic inflammatory response.

We described this as the “Ah-nold” reaction, as the immune system was panicking in some patients for reasons still unclear but most likely due to ineffective T-cell response. This caused the immune system to lash out at everything, leading to sepsis. The mortality rate for patients with severe disease jumped significantly, especially if the ICU was required (jumping to as high as 35% or more). As the pandemic progressed, effective antiviral therapy in small molecule inhibitors of viral replication and monoclonal antibodies could reduce the chance of progression to severe disease if taken within 5 days or so of symptom onset. Vaccines were also developed under accelerated testing programs, which reduced the likelihood of severe COVID and COVID mortality but did not stop transmission of SARS-CoV-2 despite early suggestions that they might. The catastrophe that was the vaccination program is discussed more below.

The main pandemic risk of SARS-CoV-2 was not its direct mortality.  Outside of the high-risk groups, SARS-CoV-2 posed minimal risk of mortality, especially to teens and younger children. In the end, SARS-CoV-2’s overall case fatality rate is best thought of as in the neighborhood of 0.3% of all infected patients, which is a really nasty flu. The overwhelming majority of cases of COVID were self-limited and did not require hospitalization. As I write this, I, your author, have never tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection, either by PCR or immuno-based rapid assays after known exposure or with even somewhat suggestive symptoms. Nor have I seen definitive serologic evidence of prior asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infection–despite testing for it periodically. I am in rare and fortunate standing in that regard. All despite several known close exposures, a few before vaccines were available. While genetic predispositions for rare “no known COVID” patients such as me are being investigated, no one in my home has tested positive at any point either. However, numerous extended family members on both sides living in the US and abroad have caught symptomatic and/or test positive COVID. An environmental protective factor is thus more tempting for our case, but I am at a loss for a plausible hypothesis. I was quicker to abandon the mask than those in my household. I continued to go to the gym and train close quarters jiu-jitsu throughout the pandemic. I was at higher risk in general for close COVID contacts throughout. Yet some members of the gym and jiu-jitsu contracted symptomatic COVID at some point during the pandemic. Those in my household also did nothing different from their peers. Although there were a couple home quarantines as close exposures of known positive cases early in the pandemic, again, no one in the household ever got symptoms or tested positive. By age and co-morbidities, none of us are in high-risk groups for COVID. Perhaps that plays a role, but again, peers with the same age, co-morbidity, and approximate social distancing compliance and vaccination status popped positive and/or symptomatic at some point during the pandemic.

Maybe we should buy more lottery tickets.

What SARS-CoV-2 excelled at, and its main pandemic public health risk, was causing severe disease requiring hospitalization. Particularly variants through delta. As the virus was respiratory and incredibly contagious, with up to 1 in 5 COVID infections resulting in severe disease, COVID could quickly overwhelm available hospital resources. This would lead to all-cause mortality increases (seen throughout the pandemic years) as healthcare facilities and staff would be overwhelmed with COVID and resources exhausted to treat other significant causes of mortality, such as accidents, cancer, and other severe underlying or emergent conditions.

“Leaks” and public document reviews have shown that public health authorities, globally, made a deliberate choice to emphasize the severity, and particularly the mortality, of COVID to “scare” compliance with public health measures. In some cases, this did include deliberate policies to mute data and observations to the contrary. However, in the clarity of hindsight, these policies were likely counter-productive, and emphasis and policy focus on the real pandemic threat of rapid bursts of high local to regional hospitalization rates raising all-cause mortality may have been more successful.

We don’t know for sure because those were never tested. We lack that control group. But policy and messaging focus on the “bed’s taken” risk would have left room for greater flexibility in quarantine and “lockdown” response, avoiding some of the severe institutional reputational damage, and in particular, some of the education, employment, inflation, and supply chain consequences of prolonged, complete lockdown in a globally interlinked society and economy.

Speaking of poor policy choices, to their detriment, Chinese authorities needed to act more quickly to quarantine the virus and were likely late to recognize the cluster by late December 2019. Wuhan public health facilities were already getting overwhelmed by the time news was really starting to get out. The virus had already broken contain and was probably beginning to spread in multiple large cities in China. From there, SARS-CoV-2 went regional in South East Asia and in our modern, extensively air-traveled world (particularly for the holidays), it began spreading internationally. Early reports suggested a terrifyingly high mortality rate in confirmed cases–as we warned at the time, this was likely a huge overestimate, as testing for SARS-CoV-2 would remain behind for several months, and previous experience with SARS and MERS showed more patients had mild or asymptomatic disease than initially thought during those outbreaks. Travel restrictions were implemented too late, as the virus had already spread by international commercial and recreational travel and was consistently ahead of public health detection and response. This is mostly attributable to delays in getting effective screening testing in place. If there was an argument for “lockdown,” the infamous “two weeks to halt the spread,” it was slowly spread enough to allow testing availability to catch up. Not the epidemiologists’ academic mistake, which became unfortunate policy and proclamation, that a complete society-wide “shelter in place” lockdown was even feasible. After all, just in the US, the grocery stores that fed most of the population would be empty in 3-7 days. Many households did not have more than a week’s supply of food saved up. Other countries were also ill-prepared at the household level for “shelter in place” for the duration authorities demanded. In many places worldwide, culture and local market availability means food is bought fresh daily or stored no more than 2-3 days at a time. Refrigeration is not common everywhere in the world, to say nothing of freezers or sizes that store weeks of food at a time.  

Two weeks of total societal isolation proved impossible to sustain. To quote “Dune,” “the spice must flow,” and essential workers would ensure that infection vectors would continue despite the lockdown. Thus, the pandemic persisted.

Ultimately, available medical technology caught up to control and mitigate COVID severity and risk of COVID hospitalization. The policy could have been faster to catch up to these advances, though. China, for example, maintained draconian public policy measures until they became socially untenable and risked outright revolution. Natural immunity and vaccine-mediated resistance, coupled with the natural course of pandemic evolution to “less severe, more contagious” variants, eventually and unequivocally reduced the rate of severe COVID by mid to late 2022 in most places in the world. When the winter of 2022-2023 showed no significant severe COVID activity, it was clear the pandemic phase of COVID had ended.

SARS-CoV-2 omicron and descendant variants, which were highly contagious but prone to mild, if any, symptomatic disease, shifted to endemic spread throughout the world.

–The complete side effect profile of the vaccines will continue to be debated and studied, and we will know much more definitively over the coming years. Much of the current discussion is correlation, not causation. Follow-up studies will be needed to establish the necessary mechanistic link. Many of the screaming headlines cite studies that do not make the essential comparison against active COVID infection or rule out concurrent COVID infection with the presumed side effect (especially since the vaccines turned out to be ineffective in stopping infection but effective in reducing severe COVID hospitalization, and death, especially in high-risk populations). Restricting any further vaccine boosters to high-risk groups only, and with a discussion of risk/benefits, is increasingly policy worldwide and is prudent. The most believable side effects, such as myocarditis risk and clotting with some of the COVID vaccines, are already on the labels. These, or complications similar to these, are also the most common side effect in the VAERS database. These are believable because they are also KNOWN complications of COVID itself, and thus mediation by the spike protein in the virus and vaccine is probable, if not confirmed. Some of the auto-immune-like complications I expect to be vaccine-associated as well since it is a massive dose of vaccine, and the famous “Pfizer flu” and “Moderna malaise” of the second shot in the primary series or boosters are the symptoms of a highly active immune response. It is important to note that the risk of these complications, such as myocarditis, is MUCH higher with active COVID infection than the vaccines. Active infection typically produces a much higher total amount of spike protein. The incidence of complications also increases with the severity of COVID, which is likely due to the total amount of spike protein produced and the duration of the production in a tough battle with SARS-CoV-2.

–As a public health measure, the vaccination program was a catastrophic failure, despite high eventual rates of vaccination. The compulsion used to achieve those rates is where the lasting public health damage will lie.

The vaccines were accelerated through clinical testing and showed efficacy against hospitalization and death (again, the critical pandemic goals for the vaccines). However, the mRNA vaccines, in particular, were noted in the media to be a novel vaccination strategy. This vaccination strategy, especially for a positive-stranded RNA virus-like SARS-CoV-2, copied the last part of natural viral infection–but only produced the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, meaning the vaccine could not result in full COVID infection. However, the spike protein produced would elicit antibodies, and having those produced by cells that had taken up the vaccine mRNA, also created effective T-cell responses. The T-cell response was shown in later research to be as, if not more, important than antibodies and likely of longer duration. In my opinion, far too much emphasis was placed on antibodies, and quantifying titers, despite titers not necessarily being predictive of who would or would not have severe disease on re-challenge by exposure to the virus. This led to decisions around boosters, such as schedule and who would benefit most versus the risk of the clotting and inflammatory effects of the spike protein itself, that were not immediately obvious based on the available evidence. Studies used as justification for these decisions sometimes needed improvement in their method as well.  

The more significant problem around the vaccines were political decisions and messaging. In the US, the vaccination program was started under the government of one political “tribe,”–which meant the opposite political “tribe” automatically opposed it and spent much of the winter loudly casting doubt and mistrust on the “dangerously” accelerated testing and approval process.

Then that tribe won the election, and the messaging suddenly flipped. Little initial effort was made to engage those hesitant to get the new vaccines, with resistance often disparaged as a political decision. Instead, many minority populations in the US had historical reasons to doubt new medical treatments based on unethical medical studies performed on those populations. Their hesitancy was understandable based on past experience. So instead of seeking the causes of vaccine hesitancy, clearly engaging and addressing them (such as by videos which would show the nuts and bolts production, or how they mimicked viral infection, but with just the spike protein of the virus), government policy was at first political ridicule and hectoring. The “Twitter Files” and WhatsApp document releases in other countries showed that governments actively suppressed legitimate questions about vaccines, and even true side effects, believing that a “good lie” was better than a truth that might cause people to hesitate about the government-chosen vaccination campaign. This did incalculable damage to the reputation of these vaccines, this vaccination technology, and vaccination in general. Post-pandemic surveys have shown more parents, for example, are now hesitant to have their children complete the childhood vaccine series, despite decades of evidence they work and are safe and near eradication of many of the targeted severe infections.  

Indeed, the willingness of public health officials, typified by Dr. Anthony Fauci in the US, to deliberately lie “for a greater policy good” while claiming they were the science (whatever that personification non sequitur was intended to mean) did significant damage to the reputation of modern medicine as a whole. Overall mortality may also be seeing a contribution from a more general mistrust of medicine by a growing segment of the public. “More aggressive” cancers being anecdotally reported on social media and elsewhere may have as much to do with delayed diagnosis from people more reticent to go to allopathic medicine. Right now, it’s a very big and growing business to be an “alternative”, “holistic” or “natural” provider, and if you are not a Hypothetical Posterity Reader, you can likely find advertisements for these facilities (often NOT run by an MD or DO) growing wherever you may be. The lockdowns had adverse effects on mental and physical health (from gym closures, for example), including higher rates of drug and alcohol abuse and addition. Thus, a less healthy population has a growing percentage who now mistrusts their healthcare system–with justification if you take a Dr. Fauci and his “ethics” to be its exemplar. This is the public health disaster which vaccine messaging played no small role in creating, and will likely lead to a higher baseline of overall mortality in the post-pandemic near term.

There will continue to be conspiratorial conjectures in dark corners of the internet that overall mortality is increasing because of long term undisclosed vaccine side effects. Ironically, a side effect of the vaccination campaign is undoubtedly the chief contributor to that increase–but it has nothing to do with the chemistry or biology of the vaccines, and everything to do with the inoculation AGAINST trust and use of the health care system leading to death and disease from preventable or treatable causes. That is the consequential breach of trust and faith that lack of leadership ethics and wisdom in public health, especially the vaccines, created throughout the pandemic.

–What other broad lessons should we, and posterity, take from the Time of Coronavirus?

Well, we should listen to history.

We have a much longer post about the Black Death and the parallels we anticipated for our pandemic; you can read that here.

But the short version distills to a few key lessons. Hypothetical Posterity Reader, mark these well.

When the Black Death came to your medieval town, you had four basic choices in how you, personally, could respond. You could attempt to flee, trying to go to isolated places away from others, hoping to stay ahead of the wave of infection. You could stay, bunker down in your house, away from strangers and contact, and hope the wave would pass by. You could keep calm and carry on, conducting your regular business with just a bit of extra caution, avoiding the obviously sick, and paying closer attention to good health habits overall. Or you could assume that your infection was a foregone conclusion, your death due to disease quite possible, and party like a rock star to at least enjoy your possible last days.

You, Hypothetical Posterity Reader, can absolutely expect the same four broad human responses should a pandemic break out in your time as well. We saw the same parallels in the Time of Coronavirus. These options provoked a debate between those who wanted to enforce strict isolation on themselves and others to save lives, calling other choices irresponsible, and those who said, “We’re all going to get it; let’s just get on with it” as some combination of keep calm and carry on and just plain party on. You can also safely anticipate that friction–most of it boils down to the wide individual variation in risk tolerance.

The lesson of history, from the Black Death to the ‘Rona?

Your choice doesn’t matter and it will not change the chances that you will catch the pandemic du jour over a long enough timeline. Remember, my personal lab and symptom results are a giant outlier, and all or nearly all of my readership eventually popped positive for COVID. Despite a wide range of personal behavioral choices among them.

Once the pandemic agent has made it to your town, you can safely assume you are exposed and WILL be exposed eventually.

The second lesson? England was always going to get the Black Death. Human nature is human nature, and no island will remain an island forever. For love or money. For fear. For rebellion, even for rebellion’s sake. Whatever quarantine gets set, whatever rules authorities impose will eventually be violated. The pandemic will spread. During the Black Death, England could and should have closed its borders. The Black Death got there anyways. During the time of the coronavirus, New Zealand and Taiwan went quite sometime before serious outbreaks, as they were small islands that could reasonably control arrivals and departures. But no island is completely self-sufficient, and eventually, the virus gets in, gets through, and gets everywhere. China, as we mentioned, also managed to control outbreaks in its borders for some time–but only through aggressive repression, which eventually led to deaths just from the government response. Until outright revolution was imminent, and all restrictions dropped nearly at once, leading to one titanic wave of infection across the country late in the pandemic.

The human spirit can tolerate limits to its freedom only so long. For the same reason that existentialism is usually a passing fad, or at least makes exceptions in the hearts of its philosophers for a treasured few loved ones. The human heart seeks connection and will eventually have it, no matter the cost or risk. Our blessing and our curse.

And in fairness to any existentialists still out there, I believe they would agree that the human condition seeks profound interpersonal connection–just that it is impossible to truly know one another as well as desire to, making that drive a Sisyphean absurdity.

We roll the rock up the hill all the same.

Another lesson of history from past pandemics we would have done well to note: for leaders and institutions, the Day of the Lord has arrived. The personal courage of the people leading those institutions will be challenged–not all will pass. The ability of the institutions to function will be judged via mortal threat, affecting all parts of society at once, and forcing significant decisions to be made, made justly, communicated clearly, and enforced fairly, all under incomplete information in a very fluid and tense situation. Some of your institutions, you will find, have built their house on sand, not rock, and will not survive this flood.

Hypothetical Posterity Reader, you don’t know which institutions and leaders those are yet.

But you will find out.

Speaking of affecting all parts of society at once, there will be inevitable socioeconomic effects. I cannot comment quite as well on how the Middle Ages reacted to these–the mortality rate made for a different impact altogether. Our leadership did an abysmal job of anticipating the likely and predictable effects of both the virus and the reaction to it. Significant supply chain disruptions rippled for years after the first coronavirus cases and accelerated what were already smoldering inflationary fires. As I write this, those issues are still not resolved because Mother Nature gave us an unusually kind winter last year that was likely an exception, not a rule. In the Middle Ages, a significant spike in inflation and disruption to trade was reported as well–but most of humanity were subsistence farmers, making do on very local production of goods. In this respect, the Middle Ages were likely more resilient to the inevitable trade and finance disruptions.

Institutions and leaders will face three sequential challenges in the pandemic. First, from the health effects of the pandemic itself. This will resolve biologically, and there is little to be done other than identify the primary pandemic threat (direct mortality of the Black Death; “bed’s taken” collapse of local/regional health care and all-cause mortality from swamping rates of acute hospitalization for COVID). Then you need to seek an effective treatment and/or prevention for that primary pandemic threat as fast as possible. Otherwise, the only way out is through, with eventual herd immunity via recovered survivors. Second, leaders and institutions will be tested by the socioeconomic effects, as losses due to illness and necessary response will severely disrupt trade and production for at least some period of time. The last test is the most difficult. In both the Black Death and the Time of the Coronavirus, an almost indescribable zeitgeist set in. A widespread, unspoken, but somehow felt, and felt in common, state of shock. No one expects the pandemic or the Spanish Inquisition in their lifetime. No one escapes unscathed, having seen their expectations of “normal” completely upended. There is a loosening of trust, a breakdown of prior basic civility. A brusqueness, almost curt, even combative to interactions sometimes–everyone could feel, but no one could really say why it was happening. You begin to expect the worst, expect the world set to maximum stupid, as we often said on these pages. Sadly, you are less wrong in that than you think. Until the institutions, leaders, and even ourselves, as we undergo a crucible of our own courage, spirit and wisdom, when everything normal slides away into a chaotic pandemic flood at once, emerge renewed and refreshed on the other side, things will remain… unsettled.

The Black Death set in motion the Renaissance, as the nobility was too decimated by disease and loss of institutional trust to stop sweeping societal change over the next decades and centuries. I do not know how the Time of the Coronavirus will end, but I can tell you, writing it now, many more outcomes are possible now than were before the virus. Not that the virus caused them, but it accelerated. We could see what was built on sand and learned that “normal” is just a cognitive bias. A century is still unfolding in the decade in which I write this, and I doubt the change will stop there.

Our fragilities were obvious in retrospect, and you can read them in detail here in a compare/contrast to the bronze age. Our society is dependent, at its core, on the predictable delivery of an amount of energy in a reasonably predictable price range, and our specialization has come at the cost of generalization and unexpected interdependencies. “Work at home” highlighted class differences, as food and clothing were no longer made at home but provided via others from long, just-in-time supply chains made possible by that predictable supply of energy. Some would still need to show up in person–that was unavoidable and led to significant class friction. The COVID disruption to the predictability of availability, let alone price, of energy in particular, was and is the driver of the post-pandemic world starting to emerge.

Lastly, for the historical perspective, you should anticipate, Hypothetical Posterity Reader, that these times will test you physically and spiritually. You must, you must remind yourself of those who have gone through before you, from the Black Death to the Time of the Coronavirus. As we have passed through, so shall you. Resolve to emerge on the other side stronger. If you were not respecting your health before, take this as the warning it was to do so. Most of the risk factors for severe COVID are addressed by proper exercise, diet, and vitamin D. Not much you can do about aging, but being as functional as possible when you get there should be the post-pandemic goal. More importantly, recognize what the isolation and zeitgeist teaches–that humanity is all of one fabric. We cannot stand the isolation, and we can all feel it when it is “off.” At our core, we long for a better world. To harm another is to inevitably harm oneself, and the philosophers and wise men and women of old had it right to urge us to love our neighbors as ourselves. Expect the zeitgeist post-pandemic–resolve to fight back against it by actively seeking the good in each other and seeking to restore relations. That is how you fill that hole, that feeling of loss and worry, somehow, that nags you. Most importantly, if you were neglecting the lesson before, recall the words of Seneca the Younger when he cautioned in his letters that we are most wasteful of what is truly most precious–time.

We spoke of “quiet quitting” and the major lifestyle and career choices many made after the pandemic. The underlying driver was the imminent threat of mortality; the forced disruptions, depersonalization, isolation, and hostilities in our lives caused many, in the silence of their hearts, to question how they were -really- spending their time before. After the pandemic, many chose to spend that time differently. Hopefully for the better.

–That said, for my contemporaries, that endpoint is still in our future. We are still in the crucible and have merely shifted from the acute pandemic threat to the ripples and tsunamis it is leaving in its wake.

Our physical and spiritual strength and courage is still being demanded of us, still being measured.

So I will close this out on where I am personally, surveying the field right now…

I have written often enough of the bonfire of institutional credibilities. The resolution of that is still ongoing, so it is premature to say too much here. Some of the recent headlines show that leaders of those institutions during the pandemic are now taking…constructive… liberties and interpretations of their actions and pronouncements, and either being called out or defended for them in the public sphere is only part of the resolution process. These institutions took a long time to reach whatever form and function they would have when the crucible of the pandemic struck. We can expect them to take some time in the forge, to re-emerge in whatever form they will have going forward. The path for some may be stepwise. For others, it may well come suddenly. I think of it as the flood of pandemic washing away the foundation of sand underneath some, and only as the subsequent waves, like economic and geopolitical upheaval, strike will the flawed portions come crashing down and the real rebuilding start.

For example, the Renaissance did not flourish immediately after the Black Death. If medieval medicine had a sudden epiphany after the Black Death, it was only the realization that current understanding and treatment was inadequate and needed to change.

Essentially, what happens is that the vanguard of the status quo in those institutions weighed, measured, and found wanting to suffer a loss of credibility. You see this first in explanations of how it didn’t -really- fail or reinventing history in the forlorn hope that everyone will agree the emperor has clothes in the way they used to. But everyone knows what everyone else knows now–that vanguard was wrong when it mattered, and this means voices calling for another way will get a listen they would not have gotten before. Martin Luther, for example, was probably not the first parish priest or university cleric to challenge some of the corruption in the Church. The credibility blow that the senior leadership of the medieval Catholic Church had suffered during the plague years, coupled with the social upheaval of the following century, made for “right time, right place.” Same for the decentralization of Italy into city-states competing for markets along the Silk Road, rediscovering lost ideas and technologies, and allowing city-states like Florence to lead the Renaissance charge.

Squint hard enough, and you can see new voices that are -not- tribally committed to gaining traction on social media, their podcasts and blogs spreading by word of mouth.

Is the censorship drive du jour, from both tribes, evidence of this change taking place–where the vanguard has lost credibility of their arguments, their old ideas that failed in the crisis, and must now resort to silencing these upstart voices? I think you can make that argument. The censorship push, and misdirection, will ramp to 11 with the new AI tools available, but I expect that will fail.

The bonfire of institutions, while a change from our normalcy bias, is not to be feared. Unless you are in the vanguard of its leadership or especially committed to them. This is creative destruction. It is necessary. It is progressive. It is what makes many outcomes possible. Yes, some of them go down dark roads. But some of the outcomes now possible are clearly positive changes towards a more just world. These were blocked by complacency, lethargy, and sclerosis in some of these institutions and ideas–that is not necessarily so anymore, over these coming years.

–Of course, this raises the question of who will lead us there.

Most of the readers would agree that the leaders who acquitted themselves well during the pandemic are difficult to identify. At best, you are probably thinking of a few people who you know personally and locally who rose to meet the physical and spiritual challenge of the time.

At the highest levels, there was ample evidence generated, repeatedly and internationally, our axiom that for politicians, the perception that they are being effective is as good as actually being effective. If the former comes at a less perceived risk or cost, you may safely anticipate “leaders” of weaker character to choose that route. If events go against them, again, you may safely anticipate “leaders” of weaker characters focusing first on the perception of the event. Because if you fix the public perception of the problem, politically–just as good.

What we found is that far, far more leaders than we would like were of weaker character than we believed.

At least in the US, we also discovered that the tribal poles, in terms of leadership quality, were distinction without difference.

Yes, I know that is a controversial statement–so let me point out that social distancing, including lockdowns AND the vaccination campaign began under Donald Trump, leader of one pole. The top-down social distancing measures, including lockdowns, CONTINUED, along with an even greater emphasis on vaccination, under Joe Biden, leader of the other pole. The public health leadership, personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci, served under BOTH Trump AND Biden, throughout the pandemic, despite ample reason and opportunity to fire him. True story. Just go through our backlog of these updates, as they happened, and you’ll see what I say is historical fact.

<whispers> Nor is this the only place or policy where, when you carefully document what both tribes do or don’t do when in power, there is distinction without difference between them.

Perchance this is why a pox and plague came upon both their houses…

Before you “@” me, Hypothetical Reader, aghast that I have made a moral equivalence between the tribes you disagree with…. Look in your heart and argument. If your argument will include “yes, but..” you are about to try to convince me that one tribe is at least marginally less bad than the other. “The lesser of two evils is still not a good” is your answer.

Oh, and if the 2024 election were today, according to the polls as I write this, our US readers would have a “choice” between these two candidates–again.

Hypothetical Posterity Reader, may God have preserved the Union.

Thus, we arrived at the Aliens’ Arrival Razor for leadership quality. If you cannot immediately call to mind a leader whose decision-making and character you can trust to be the answer when the aliens ask to be taken to your leader, you need to change your leaders. You also probably need to reflect on the selection pressures that got your current crop of “leaders” at the same time.

Our thesis has been that the rise of social media and the internet, in general, changed those selection pressures. To be more precise, though, social media and the internet have done so only as a function of the next step in communication technology. For example, think back to the Middle Ages again. We were all taught that most of the populace of the Dark Ages was illiterate, and this is a bit misleading. Large portions of the population could absolutely read and write in their local vernacular and do just fine with the limited needs for it a mostly agrarian society had. Transmission of ideas over distances and across cultures was -very- expensive, though. Books had to be produced by hand, and in Europe, typically in Latin, since that was a common language thanks to the widespread interaction of the old Roman Empire. Only the clergy and nobility were literate in Latin, though–that’s the statistic you hear in history class. Only they could afford books or the time to really read them. Even so, by the late Middle Ages, vernacular literature was becoming quite common. Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” pre-dates Johann Gutenberg and was a “best seller.” It was also written entirely in English and very much for common readers. But suffice it to say that cost, time, and language were all barriers to the dissemination of ideas and put narrow limits to the Overton Window.

Similarly, in the Middle East and Asia, you had vast libraries in Arabic (the common language thanks to Muslim conquests) and, for example, Chinese, a legacy of the imperial record-keeping system. Like in Europe, though, literacy in the language doing most of this recording was limited, making dissemination of the ideas and knowledge slow. Few scholars were literate in Arabic, Latin, and Mandarin, though, which, along with politics, kept the exchange of ideas between significant global cultures slow. As we all read in the history books.

With Gutenberg, this starts to change. The number of volumes available in Europe shot up like a rocket. More books could now be translated and marketed in the common languages. More people could read, and the Overton Window got larger. This no doubt influenced some of the major social shifts, including the loss of power that hereditary nobility and the Church had in Europe at the time, since knowledge of Latin and what was -in those books was no longer restricted to these classes.

At the same time, though, you had greater selection pressures. Those books, whose writing and ideas were the most widely and well received, did better and thrived. Those are also the ones we are most likely to still have copies of today, like “The Canterbury Tales.” More generally, those works which commanded more attention from the masses did better.

Fast forward, and communication gets faster and more transmissible over long distances. From the Pony Express to the telegraph, more ideas could be communicated faster and faster. This, too, changed the Overton Window. Before the Pony Express, for example, someone had to decide what news was most likely to still be relevant to California by the time it got there. With the telegraph, you could send all the East Coast news almost as it happened and let Californians decide, via their attention, which of that was most important to them. So the Overton Window got larger, and the pressure on the newspapers was to be better at picking and transmitting what came off those telegraph wires to make it most relevant and interesting to their audiences. Control of the Window came down to the limited number of telegraphs, the amount of information they could “tap” across the continents, and the filter of the limited number of newspapers and their editors.

By the time radio and TV came around, more information could go more instantly and more directly to people. The cost for the infrastructure was first subsidized by the government (and then controlled, to some extent, by regulations on it) but then paid for by advertising, as companies were willing to provide the media to the masses at no cost to the masses, just to ensure their message got to as many as possible.

Again, though, the immediacy of the media–how quickly you could get the information–and its ability to command attention set the selection pressure. TV ads would wind up costing more because TV reliably commanded more attention from more people–Super Bowl ads most famously.

But, the Overton Window still had an effective constraint. While the town square had moved to TV, radio, etc., the ability to produce your own radio show or TV show and get your ideas out to the masses was prohibitive. Similar to books being expensive to print by hand back in the Middle Ages, and thus commissioned and “run” by a few rich and powerful clergy and nobility, Walter Cronkite became the Overton Window because there was a limit to the number of other voices that could compete with Walter in the public square.

The main change in modern media is that social networks and the internet dramatically lowered the barrier of entry to the public square while enlarging the public square. You effectively had the revolutions of speed of transmission (similar to the telegraph) with the reduced cost to produce your own contributions (movable type printing press), and now have topped that off with translation that lets ideas spread around the world almost instantly.

Just wait until AI video editing can take your kid’s 8th-grade history video and make it look like a Marvel movie–and kids halfway around the world will be watching clips of it.

Or will they? While the Overton Window has now been thrown wide open, and essentially any idea can find its niche audience on a discord server or YouTube channel family, and has, getting any one specific message through the town square is now much harder. The competition for attention is literally global.

So now, let’s think about politicians and what political rule really means. This is quite timely with the recent coronation of King Charles. Political rule used to be a guy donning a hat that just looks silly in the modern era, wearing a jarringly anachronistic outfit, making edicts because the rules say the guy with the silly hat gets to, and everyone has to follow that. One understands the utter confusion of most Native American tribes encountering Europeans describing the absolute monarchies they served in the colonial eras, as the vast majority of Native American tribes had chiefs whose authority was not absolute, and demanded consensus and trust (if they even had a single executive leader at all). Also, why many Europeans captured by these tribes and living at least some time with them often escaped back to these tribes, rather than stay living in absolute monarchies–and why the solons did not start debating democracy, leading to the Enlightenment philosophies underpinning the American and French revolutions, until after encountering tribes where the man in the silly hat needed to convince you of his ideas, rather than merely compel you.

As we highlighted with George Martin’s brilliant analogy of Varys’ Riddle, political power lies only where the people believe it lies. If you are a politician, you must capture the attention of, and then persuade, the people that you are in charge and your ideas are best–and working. Even if you are a medieval monarch or a totalitarian dictator, there is still a key small set of people you must convince–a set of barons or generals who must be convinced your rule is a wiser idea than trying to replace you. They, in turn, must convince their knights and soldiers at the more local level to listen to their orders. For some politicians and political systems, this is all high-stakes stuff–as Martin said in “The Game of Thrones,” you win, or you die.

Compulsion by the state only happens when the leaders can convince the people in the military, the police, the IRS, etc., of their way and their rules, and thus convince them to use force (economic, social, physical) to compel behavior from reluctant or recalcitrant members of the society. A good example of the state’s ability to compel depending on the credibility of the state’s leadership is the end of “The Lives of Others,” where the East German Stasi office workers are conducting another day’s intrusive monitoring and censorship at the direction of the state, all while listening to the radio. When they hear the Berlin Wall has fallen, they all -all, stop what they are doing immediately and simply leave. There is no cause for their censorship and compulsion any longer.

All of that is a winding way of saying that the incentives of our politicians with respect to communication and technology have stayed the same. They need to get the people’s attention, hold it, and persuade them to their desired action. Or they have no power whatsoever. When Machiavelli argued leaders should prefer fear to love, he did so because his experience in Renaissance Italy showed fear had been more persuasive than love in getting political results. Of course, to be feared, people must first notice you. Attention must precede persuasion.

What has changed over the centuries now is the competition level for that attention–and competition for persuasiveness.

Social media and the internet have heightened those competitions. More voices than ever can now be heard in the global town square–which is great. Stories that used to be ignored, particularly of the marginalized, can now be heard. But the bar to capture attention to get your message across, especially if you must communicate to a wide swath of the population, is now much higher.

Good ideas, clearly communicated, should have an advantage. That is the signal we all seek from all this noise in the modern world.

But other evolutionary strategies can be successful in these competitions. And they are “survival of the fittest” evolutionary, as attention (and thus persuasion) will flow naturally to the most riveting communications to the most, or most important, set of people.

We have seen some of these in action. In particular, because attention is now more precious than ever, messages are increasingly “weaponized” to get the necessary attention. A strong emotional response is “sticky” for attention–and priming for persuasion, depending on what you want to persuade. Want to sell insurance or a defense budget? Try to provoke at least a bit of fear or worry. Thus, messages are increasingly meant to provoke or elicit an emotional response. The narrative is a major communication strategy of homo sapiens–fitting into a story mold, we recognize works. So is tribalism. We like an “our side” that we differentiate from “other” and seek reinforcement of these differences. We also find narratives more persuasive (they are easier to understand and follow), AND we find members of “our” tribe more persuasive. So higher competition pressure on attention and persuasion should predictably hone messages to be more narrative-driven AND tribal.

Thus, the competitive pressures and natural incentives lead to all of the things we all hate about the modern era, with silos of information, driving tribal narratives, and skewing facts for maximum impact, following financial and effective incentives for the messengers to attract and keep as much attention as possible.  These are now assisted by increasingly machine learning-assisted algorithms to maximize attention. Profits for social media, regular media, digital media, and advertising companies–power for the politicians piggybacking these communication channels.

My hypothesis is that the increased level of competition, more voices in the common square, each competing harder to be heard, is the selection pressure that has created the schismogenesis we perceive. Put another way, the maladaptive, schismogenesis-promoting messages are the unintended result of increasingly cut-throat competition for attention, and attention is important enough an incentive to some of these players to make that competition no holds barred. We can expect those incentives to predictably abuse emerging artificial intelligence technology that can adjust to become even MORE attention-grabbing, even if that continues to reward and weaponize schismogenesis and is ultimately catastrophic for society.

The AI algorithm is optimized for attention, not the message or the outcome if the message is successful. The human decides on that.

We went over this as a danger of AI in our epic AI post, but the risk here is that humans can be zealots. Zealots can be unwise and wrong–but they do tend to be committed and willing to advance their cause by any means necessary. Even worse, the optimization for attention in the public square leading to the most emotionally charged narratives, playing on tribalism, will only positively reinforce the zealots. They will encounter their extreme beliefs more often and louder, and this can only convince them that their beliefs are not extreme, and they are the vanguard, the bold, the willing to act where the silent majority must agree with them (look how often their views pop up as clickbait!) will not.

Like a certain subset of Ivy League credentialed people I have encountered professionally, they don’t realize they are stupid, and worse, the world has told them quite differently so far. Thus, their stupidity is compounded by unearned confidence.

The selection pressures inadvertently optimize for schismogenesis, shock, fear, anger, and zealotry.

This is normalized, and our “leadership” has come to reflect it. Look no further than “Dark Brandon” versus Trump. Worse, we are herded into these tribes to protect us from what we are told are the increasing hordes of zealots on the other side–when there would be fewer zealots if they could see how abnormal they really are! When you put zealots in power, optimized for attention, you optimize for a world stuck on Maximum Stupid.

We have documented Maximum Stupid here these last few years, and we can confidently project that probability for several more to come. (had we predicted Maximum Stupid sooner, we would be on a beach in Tahiti–alas).

Maximum Stupid will continue until we stop it.

This is easier than you think but still challenging nonetheless. The algorithms optimizing attention? Even the AI that will be applied to make them even better, even more emotionally grabbing?

They’re really dumb. No, I’m serious; they really are. They find what they think, or can see, grabs and holds your attention, or better yet, provokes an action (like opening social media or email to start typing or start texting, sharing links, or opening an Amazon page to buy, etc.).

All you need to do to be a Hero, or Heroine, of the modern era is protect your attention. Treat it as the most precious thing on earth. Then give it only to that which builds. Don’t feed the media silos that are riling you up. Don’t linger on things that draw forth Yoda’s description of the Dark Side. Give your attention to those things which build, which break down schismogenesis, which unite and are positive. Stop highlighting differences. Start finding common ground. Consciously, in all the media and searching, you do. This will be hard at first because you’ll slip here and there and are used to the comfort of familiar sites, places, and voices. But look at the world that is creating. You will not get the world you want doing what we have been doing.

Be the hero we deserve.

Teach others to do the same.

You will begin to win against the algorithms.

If you want to encourage yourself that this is achievable and easier than you think, train the algorithm yourself and watch how quickly it responds to what you like. Seriously. Run this experiment. Go to YouTube, and type in “puppies and kittens being cute.” Click on a few videos–even linger for a few short ones that are particularly heartwarming. Do this at least once a day for a week. One week later, without typing anything, YouTube will start to “suggest” videos of puppies and kittens being cute. Your feed will start to fill with them. You’ll also be able to see the cross-talk among sites, as you will likely start to see similar changes on other media sites. That’s how easy it is to change these really dumb algorithms. Just be warned–occasionally, YouTube will spike in a suggestion that is a blast from your past. Especially if it got lots of emotional views from people it thinks are similar to you. This is the temptation to go back down the Dark Side. Don’t do that. Stick to your small but significant part, and begin training the algorithms creating this real-world disaster to focus on the signals and voices in the town square that really build.

Our leaders are out there–the ones worthy to meet the aliens. Turn the algorithms back from zealots, and have them amplify the voices of the angels of our better nature instead.

–I will caution that the other solution being proposed is worse. This solution is a cooperation between the new media and government to censor or mute voices in the town square. First, this is exactly how marginalized voices that have been freed to speak to their experience and contribution, in real-time no less, were marginalized and silenced before–chokepoint control at the gatekeepers. We should not repeat that mistake. Second, there is absolutely zero reason to trust the government to do this responsibly, and to Popper’s point, you can reliably expect the worst possible people to eventually be running the government.  Now is definitely not the moment, as zealots are so common in either tribe that we have no one plausible to take the aliens to. Suggested further reading is the report of the Church Committee, the Pentagon Papers, the Panama Papers, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Wikileaks, and Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself, as just a shortlist. I also think every government has a list like this–these are only top of mind because I live in the US, and I think the people who threw tea in the ocean rather than pay the taxes are both more suspicious of the government and more likely to air its dirty laundry. Third, it is doomed to failure because code is cheap and internet access easy. The more Whac-A-Mole that gets played with “disinformation,” the more popular it is. What made “Plandemic” so immediately viral was not only the emotionally-laden, conspiracy narrative-driven salaciousness of its claims (sure to attract a LOT of attention) but the fact that it was taken down from popular media sites too quickly. This is the “Streisand Effect” and only serves to garner MORE attention, let alone undeserved credibility. “What the MAN doesn’t want you to KNOW!” indeed.

But this will be the first choice of the zealot because they are already convinced they are right, and they seek to impose their worldview on everyone else already anyways. So on the downside, our proliferation of zealots has put this terrible plan at risk of actual implementation. On the plus side, we have a sneaky razor to identify the zealots among us as a result: Anyone advocating deplatforming, censorship, or “sober” limits on free speech or the First Amendment is a zealot.

React accordingly.

And remember that retraining the algorithm through your vigilance and virtue is the surefire, long-term win.

And heroic.

Choose heroism.

—Indeed, navigating the schismogenesis and the zeitgeist has been the most challenging part of writing these.

There is an excellent chance, my not-so-hypothetical reader, that you disagreed with me along the way. I would even go so far as to say it is probable that you read something I wrote along the way and had a -little- emotional tinge. The thought probably crossed your mind at least once that I was wrong, clearly wrong, starting to drift to one tribal pole or another, and misled by the information silos and approved tribal narratives of that pole.

Well, there is a non-zero chance I was wrong. It happens.

As for tribal skew, I hope I didn’t, but I will concede that one is sometimes blind to one’s own biases. If that ever happened, it was not intentional. Merely my humanity, trapped in the gravity’s pull of some of these same forces. I am no more immune to them than any other.

Regardless, having a different opinion is okay! We can disagree and still be friends.

–Anyways, to relate the “be the hero” soapbox speech back to the pandemic, much of the updates were devoted to combating errors that were attention-grabbing and seemed persuasive enough that readers asked. Often, these posts/headlines/videos provoked fear/mistrust/outrage/anger and eventually started to predictably silo to tribes.

Some of the most popular updates, in fact, were the takedowns of some of the most egregiously wrong of these (like “Pandemic”). Others were buried in the “sciencepalooza” that many of you skipped past to “socioeconomic” and “chances are” sections.

I don’t blame you. The threat of the Army of the Bioterrorist Monkeys demands vigilance.

But it’s worth pointing out that the same levers creating the problem are the ones I pulled to fight it.

Reading these requires your attention. And I am fortunate that truth tends to be persuasive, and the science was usually on my side. The biology of SARS-CoV-2 mutation frequency surprised me, as did the limited utility of the vaccines in reducing spread and infection, especially after the “initial burst.” I will still die on the hill, and a mountain of evidence that the vaccines are effective against severe disease, and the risk of their most feared complications is HIGHER from acute COVID than the vaccine itself in most age groups. Again, if it’s any consolation, I -believed- my interpretations of the available evidence until the data turned against me. That’s science too. I’m used to that by now, but I acknowledge that public perception is that “science” is stoic and unchanging. But biology, especially, just doesn’t work like that

Also worth mentioning that while the internet makes fast, easy, and loud the salaciously wrong, many of you would have never heard of me or encountered this update without it. Most of you got here from forwards from others who knew me and took advantage of the media to simply send this along to you. For free! Similarly, it blows my mind in the modern era that I can log on and get access to the distributed expertise in all the areas that you, the readers, are experts in, from publishing to economics to politics to engineering.

Especially since the COVID experience has highlighted that the selection pressures for attention mean that MOST of the articles/news/videos/hawt takes that you encounter, on ANY GIVEN TOPIC, are likely to be the most salacious version. The probability they are -that topic’s- version of Pandemic is shockingly high.

The example that rises to my mind immediately is the South African correspondent, whom I periodically torture with sanity checks. They are on the ground in South Africa, and like I tried to do with this update through the pandemic, their tacit expertise and experience in all things South Africa are a valuable resource to parse what is real and what is clickbait in South African news. Through that, over time, I have now come to expect most headlines I encounter about South Africa in the US to be salacious and the actual situation not nearly as bad as often described. This is because no one covers Africa well, apparently, and “DOOOOM!” is emotionally investing. Those clickbait headlines and skews aim for fear/anxiety/concern–all to be attention-grabbing.

And the algorithms presenting it are optimized for -attention-.

Until we retrain them.

I am fortunate to have this same technology, though it allows me to immediately access trustworthy, reliable people who know the subject well. (Economics is another area where I phone a friend for “is this -really- a bank run?” headline sanity checks…) I am shameless in my sanity checks–and they are a genuine good to have. Especially in this modern era.

Because flogging my favorite dead horses is apparently my thing, this is also how we will steer ourselves through the coming deep fake/AI crisis. I do think that the attention-grabbing, zealotry enforcing modern moment will get these tools and immediately run themselves aground on them. They won’t be able to help themselves. They will use it to present such an obviously skewed and unreal version of the world, even if attention-grabbing and at first convincing (because of AI assistance), that they will provoke a society-wide singularity. A crisis of trust, where we wake up and realize that we do need to be more careful with our attention and more suspicious of what we read.

While the dark mirror will bring us to this crisis of trust, we will then unlock the great benefit of it on the other side. Again, via your heroism. We can re-train the algorithms to optimize not only attention but reliability. And the voices of our better nature. We can use this same technology to give attention not only to random zealots in the town square, calling out their madness, but to quietly turn to people we know and trust or are referred to by people we know and trust so that we are not taken in by the zealots.

–We are only just starting down the road to that brighter future, though. In fact, sticking a finger in the air for the zeitgeist, I argue that we are still very much in that odd malaise we have discussed. Just this morning I was reading how the Indiana State Police will be tracking road rage incidents, because there has been an unusually high number of serious incidents–including some shootings–on the Indiana interstates this year. That’s the zeitgeist, still, and we’re not to the summer or an election year yet. But we are still in that mental prison Black Death historian John Kelly described:

“In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships. It makes everyone an enemy and every one an isolate. In plague, every man becomes an island–a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear, and despair.”

Again, we should have listened to the past and anticipated this on the other side of our pandemic. Mark well, Hypothetical Posterity Reader!

Worse for us, suspicion, fear, and despair are only reinforced by the bias of our media right now, sadly.

Until we re-train the algorithm via your heroism…

Plagues and pandemics are fundamentally biological. They are disease, a deadly disorder of the natural state. They emphasize the animal, and they bring out the base brutishness of homo sapiens’ biology. For what is suspicion, fear, and despair but the natural, instinctive reaction of the animal? The flight in the flight or fight response?

We are more than that. A random chance of the algorithm brought me to Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder. She was trying to make some of Einstein’s equations understandable for even biology dummies like me and made a profound point. To paraphrase her, she observed that we think of ourselves as “matter” and mostly “mass,” made up of atoms, but this isn’t quite correct. We are mostly energy, specifically the strong nuclear force holding the nuclei of the atoms comprising you together. If we were to take just a few of the most simple atoms in you, smash them together, overcoming that strong nuclear force and releasing it–of just a few of the unthinkably large number of atoms in “you”–that’s fusion. We would release, from you, literally the energy of the sun. You are more than made up of stardust–you are the energy that lights the darkness and shows the way through the silent, cold void.

This made me think of CS Lewis in “A Grief Observed,” reflecting on the death of his wife and the dark night of his soul that followed when he said, “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person.” This was the start of an argument against materialism, for as his grief tested his faith, he concluded, albeit from a different argumentation than Sabine, that we are more than mere matter.

More than just the animal.

“Flight” was understandable and excusable in the time of the Black Death and the Time of Coronavirus.

That time has passed now. Now, our task is to turn and fight. Not each other, not like some cornered, wild beast raging “against the dying of the light.”

No, we must each, consciously, deliberately, choose to turn and make our stand. Against “flight”, against the instincts and forces that would see us continue to be “small, haunted island[s] of suspicion, fear, and despair.”

Our fight now is to let the light inside us, down even in our smallest elements, shine through again…

–I don’t know about you, but personally, I am tired of being on islands of suspicion, fear and despair. I am tired of a world that accidentally incentivizes zealotry, where the dial is on max stupid, and we wind up amplifying suspicion, fear and despair as a result.

This world is so needy.

It clamors for my attention, the worst three-year-old, tugging on my pant leg with its hysterical demands. Throwing tantrums and spewing threats whenever I try to ignore it. Why do we reward these tantrums? The siren calls of zealots, fools, and would-be tyrants? Why do we give in to an age that literally knows nothing yet thinks nothing is more important than the immediate gratification of its every want and desire?

I wonder if I can still hear the signal through all this useless noise.

I feel a temptation in that for even more flight. Not to suspicion, fear, and despair, per se. But flight from the clamor and noise of this world–just space to find my own peace of mind again.

“Just leave me alone!” I scream back at the cacophony of this world, in the echoes of my mind. I wonder if you do the same? Am I alone in this feeling?

Some of my favorite scenes in the Daniel Craig James Bond movies have been those opening scenes where he’s retired. Presumed dead, disappeared on a beach in South East Asia. Or retired in Jamaica. I picture myself there, in James’ place, and thought, “Man, if only….”

I wrote about one of my favorite daydreams, the Restaurant at the End of the World. That’s true. Absolutely one of my favorite daydreams. I even have the 80s soundtrack started on Spotify to help me anytime I want to close my eyes and have lunch there, from a plastic basket lined with wax paper, with the best blackened catch of the day sandwich in the world. Lazy afternoon day vibe. White sand off in the distance. The noise of the giant fan overhead and a soda sweating through the red, translucent plastic cup onto the table…

Realistically, though, I’m not that much of a beach guy.

So the dream shifts, and now I’m on some long lonely mountain road. Out there in a Charger. Maybe a motorcycle– classic Harley or Indian. Maybe the third resident of Wyoming, although temporary. Just cruising through on the wide-open road ahead. Classic, growling blues this time.

Out there running until the temper tantrum is over, and the world has dialed back from Maximum Stupid.

Maybe you and Moneypenny will find me there.

Maybe.

Or maybe this vision, that image… that’s just where we’ll go to celebrate at the end of all of this.

After all, this is a retirement that must be earned, the fruits of victory won against long and difficult struggle.

Bond was there too early in those movies, called back one more time, one last time into the breach.

For King and Country, James.

Thus life still imitate art?

The challenge before us now is to clear the road of all the noise, and all the distractions and focus on the way ahead. Once it’s as clear as that picture of Monument Valley above… well. Crank the music and floor it.

Fight hard for your peace of mind. Fight with everything you have. Win this battle every day with every conscious step you take back from suspicion, fear, and despair.

Help others to win their battle too…

Thanks for being along for this part of the ride.

See you out there.

“You seem tired today

Were you up all night afraid of what the future might bring?

I feel fine today

I had dreams of you in places I’ve not seen before…”

<Paladin>