Why So Much Speculation?
McLuhan and Doom, Part 1
“The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”
~ Marshall McLuhan, 1994
The medium of our age is speculation. “What will happen next?” I bet it crosses your mind every single day.
Why would you want anything less than a perfect blend of America’s finest delicacies: cocaine hit headlines and high production value corn syrup. I’m speaking of breaking news and triple-A movies, of course.
Speculation fuses two competing drives: lust for relevance and hunger for direction. Whether you believe the speculation of our age is actually sinful hinges on whether you are a maximalist, or a moderate in the Aristotelian sense.
A more interesting question is what speculation crowds out. Speculation crowds out the fact, the boring piece of evidence about the present. It’s observable, verifiable, static, boring. It’s priced into the market, so they claim. But a fact can be redeemed: throw a simplistic narrative on top and boom, you have the edutainment path to speculation.
Speculation also crowds out the literary human. What, you’re going to tell the prophecy of one guy? My neighbor? Who cares? Speculation is driven by relevance, and the more people it's relevant to, the juicier. Deep character studies don’t scale. They stray too far from the mass man, the rational actor, the everyman. Your story must feature the character sketch the average has of the average. You can play with demographics and maybe even mental illness, as a treat, but never with the rules of status.
The exception that proves the rule is the world-historical. Napoleon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and most of all Caesar. Stories of Great Men are when the literary and speculative meet. The platonic effective altruist is someone who knows every bit of FDR but little about his wife (or more likely, situationship). The logic of the world-historical is that personal life arcs are worth considering only to the extent that they are inputs to the Great Man whose output is impact on the world.
Another variation of the world-historical is the action thriller. Elon Musk put it best: “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely”. Breaking Bad is a great story, but would be buried without the drugs and violence. Still, I’m grateful for Breaking Bad and Napoleon biographies. At heart, my problem is not with the world-historical. They are the best attempts at sharing the literary man in a world inhospitable to him.
The speculation era is maximalist, not aristotelian. It seeks out extremes. From the maximalist’s position, they are simply seeking the best, most, safest superlative. We’ve found two such optima: ponzi schemes and doomsday cults. Sam Bankman-Fried was a genius in recognizing he could peddle both, simultaneously, while also playing League of Legends. In some ways, he was the ultimate rational actor, responding exactly to the incentives for doomsday cults and ponzi schemes by providing scalable, highly-relevant versions of both.
Speaking of effective altruism, some have been asking about Leopold’s post. Of course, the recursive self-improvement claim is completely detached from all evidence, including the paper which he misunderstands about diminishing returns. But that’s missing the point! Effective Altruism has been culturally stale lately. I’m happy to see them return to their core cultural product, speculative fiction that straddles cocaine headlines and sci-fi corn syrup. That’s not an insult. Do you like Tom Cruise movies? I like Tom Cruise movies. Give me more cocaine and corn syrup and maybe sneak in a little bit of that sweet, sweet literary man. It’s great that they’re retvrning to tradition.
We need more of this in the coming age. The secret to the coming age of media is the inconvenient desire for the literary man. Personal stakes matter more than hyper-relevant world-historical stakes. They matter even more than apocalyptic stakes (though some Christians may argue that apocalyptic stakes ARE personal stakes). This isn’t a normative claim, but a psychological one.
The unique role of the world-historical is to bridge us back to a world of personal story. The West will forget egalitarian universalism, the Satanic (in the Girardian sense) force that locates empathy distantly instead of proximately. This forgetting will be Nietzschian, then Christian. The story of the Nietzschian overman is convenient because it justifies personal stakes on a universal basis. It tells us that the world-historical story is the utmost good, that in our own personal lives we should all imitate the world-historical. The second forgetting will be a return to personal stakes for their own sake. The second forgetting is when it is normal and healthy to say “I don’t care about what matters to the world, I care what matters to people I know.” This is honest and good.
If you believe this Christian future history, any story that elevates the personal stakes is a Christian story. As Peter Thiel put it, “I think of even Ayn Rand as a pretty good Christian”. And remember: “The ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”