Cat Show 12/18/2020
VG: Covid has clearly taken the central stage by the end of the year. There is endless pro et contra concerning vaccines, there is endless parade of world leaders catching the virus, there are endless reports on the news about endless lockdowns, spikes, superspreaders and so on. I wonder if during the Cold War the fear mongering was comparable? It has to be. While not many Russians of a certain age are traumatized by the Cold War: they still have Real War in their bones; none of the westerners over sixty whom I’ve met, had been spared of its impact, however.
HOBBS: Americans are amazing masters of both production and consumption of paranoia. It is a market driven economy after all. One group invents the product, another turns it into an essential item, the third consumes it. It is successful model, no wonder it is doing so well all over the world.
ALICE: I hope you understand it is a good thing. We need markets, and private initiative, and corporations, and banking. Even Elizabeth Warren has said that, and one can’t be more to the left than she. This model is time proven, in the same way, as our political system is time proven. Yes, there are lies and manipulation and propaganda and paranoia, but that’s part of human nature, and both our political system and our economic one take it into consideration. That’s why we have checks and balances and invisible hand of market, and insider trading and censorship and temporary suspension of all legal and human rights, and last but not least – computer models and algorithms.
VG: That’s what bothers me, in fact. It is these models. What kind of data do they use, how do they deal with unknowns, can they really translate the complexity of nature, let alone human nature into the sequence of numbers? I feel that we finally found ourselves in some dystopian novel written long time ago. All these talk about Great Reset, or artificial intelligence, or humanoid robots replacing people. Dystopias were part of the Cold War thinking, by the way, giving a chance to their authors to imagine the follies of either socialism or capitalism and push them to their absurdist limit. Can we trust these faulty products of faulty historical situation as the guides and templates for the future?
HOBBS: But we should not dismiss them either. They’ve predicted a lot, unfortunately. Russians always joked, paraphrasing the words of a famous Revolutionary song that “we are born to convert Kafka into reality.” Not just Russians, apparently. In fact, having been burned once, Russians seem to be rather careful with their futuristic zeal. When it comes to conversion, they now prefer to convert their old style Soviet apartments into something more palatable.
ALICE. That’s the point. While Russians convert old soviet apartments and Chinese – their feudal system, and everyone else is preoccupied with materialism, it has fallen on the advanced West to dream the impossible dreams and think and act globally. The British Empire’s Burden, if you wish. BBC news is the global network, British Intelligence is the global intelligence, British banking is the global banking and so on. Give or take an American accent here or there, like in Hollywood or Netflix mini-series. You, Vladimir, made a very smart move to immigrate to the States. That’s exactly what any ambitious young man would do. At the time of Rome they would move to Rome, at the time of Napoleon – to Paris, in modern times, it has to be New York, San Francisco, or London, if British explicit class system is more appealing to you than the implicit American one.
HOBBS: Idealism? Impossible Dreams? The only impossible dreams Americans had realized was the election of Trump and then of Biden. That’s two impossible dreams in a row. And when Kamala takes over, it would be the third impossible dream. Small step for mankind, but giant step for womankind. It will be earth-shattering. I bet you, not a single Utopian could even imagine that a little girl waiting for her bus on some ill-lit street, the bus that never came due to Joe Biden hijacking it – that this little girl would one day run the most powerful country on earth. Of course, first she’ll have to throw Biden off the bus that he’s stolen from her some forty five years ago, but she is tough enough to do it. I have full confidence in her.
ALICE: Here you go with your blatant mysoginism, and its step-child - -cynicism. The world has changed and you better change with it. It is now professionals who are dreaming the impossible dreams. Professionals in computers like the leaders of Google, Microsoft of FB are dreaming about politics and medicine; professionals in economics and business are dreaming of arts and culture and invent great computer algorithms; professionals in medicine are writing science fiction and perform in dystopian dramas. And yes, as was the case with early computers, or cell phones or social networks, or search engines – these inventions were primitive and cumbersome at first, but they have now transformed the world.
HOBBS: Wow, Alice. You sound like an uncanny mixture of P. T. Barnum and Yuval Harari. On the other hand, maybe, it is not that uncanny. That’s what it takes to succeed in today’s world. Futurism, computerism, and the plane old chutzpah. Look at the success of another Harari/Barnum mixture – Elon Musk. How could I forget about him? You do need good batteries to make your dreams come true.
VG. Well, guys, speaking of which, my computer is running out of power. Till next time…
