Deserts, maps, and the terror of freedom
There was once an empire, vast and powerful beyond any that came before it. It stretched from ocean to ocean, a land of mystery and majesty.
The rulers of this empire commissioned mapmakers to create and maintain a map that represented the empire in crisp detail. They would use the map extensively, relying on it for information about the empire.
As the years and decades and centuries passed, the art of cartography inched ever closer to perfection. The map became more and more detailed, eventually reaching a perfect one-to-one correspondence with the empire itself.
The rulers now only needed the map to rule the empire. They stopped leaving the palace.
One day, a great lord grew suspicious of the accuracy of the map and decided to take a tour of the empire. To his dismay, he found that the empire had become a desert [0]. Everything had crumbled but the palace and the map. The empire he thought he knew existed only as a representation on the map.
This “desert of the real” was coined by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard as a criticism of the false realities of modern media. The map is a “simulation” turned “simulacra,” a representation that becomes so fugazi it no longer has any relationship to its underlying reality.
It is the socialmedia-ite, projecting a lifestyle of #squadgoals and #avocadotoast, but also the follower, trying desperately to aspire to an impossibly perfect, curated life. It is Hollywood romance, an ideal which does not exist and probably has never existed. It is the branding behind Whole Foods, the glossed up farmer’s market frontend to an infrastructure of inhuman proportion and intent. It is bacon bits and desire-driven advertising and algorithmic trading and everything in between. To Baudrillard, these hyperrealities pervade our society, generated by the unnatural forces of industrialization and media. They are myths created as a salve for the alienation and powerlessness inherent in a postmodern capitalist society.
Yet mythology itself is neither industrial nor postmodern. Reality distortion is as human as apple pie. We have believed, acted on, and worshipped fake things since the dawn of human history. God and Vishnu and Guanying Pu’sa and Globalization are preferable to Cthulhu and the void. We want our reality funneled through rose colored lenses into comfortable, parseable stories. The stories have gotten weirder and more distorted, but we’ve always looked for that one weird trick to stave off existential angst. Baudrillard’s more clarifying realization may have been that while God is dead, the forces that created Him are still alive and well.
I’ve always thought that pondering questions of existence is like snorting a line of caviar: luxurious as fuck, painful, and utterly pointless. On the other hand, this navel-gazing does provide a useful and endearingly non-rigorous framework for grasping life’s toughest, most important question: how should one live?
We can re-appropriate Baudrillard’s story of the map to achieve a deeper examination of reality and meaning. Let’s look at the reality of the desert, empty of meaning but consistent, and the reality of the map, rich with meaning but without clarity. The interplay between these two realities is what defines human existence.
The desert
“So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Lewis Carroll
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
A common trope in nature is that simple rules can scale up to create extremely complicated systems. Particles bumping into each other generates weather. People trading things for other things generates economies. The random mutation and combination of genes generates species and entire ecosystems. The important thing to note here is that understanding the rules neither gives us any real understanding of the system as a whole nor the ability to predict what the system will do. Knowing particle physics doesn’t do shit for predicting tomorrow’s weather.
This is what defines the reality of the desert. It is a system built on a rule set, knowable in theory, that generates a flowering complexity utterly unknowable in its patternless chaos.
A good representation of this is chaotic cellular automata. A cellular automaton is a rule operating on a space of binary cells. Think of it as a fancy Excel spreadsheet macro operating on cells that can either be white or black. The rule derives the current state of a cell from the states of its neighbors from a previous iteration.
In a one dimensional cellular automaton, the ruleset would look like this:
Given an initial condition, the automaton can evolve into something extremely complex. Certain rules, like the Rule 30 automaton depicted here, are chaotic and generate something that appears to have patterns, but really doesn’t.
The rule set for this cellular automaton is tiny. It’s 8 bits. To put that into perspective, each character I’m typing here is 4 times as big. From these 8 bits you can generate a complex, fascinating pattern that defies explanation. To reproduce this pattern, you either need to regenerate it or you need to spend far more than 8 bits to capture it; “far more” meaning potentially infinite.
Even if you know the rule set so clearly that you can regenerate the desert, you still know nothing about the deserts that you’ve generated.
In our reality, the system generated by the rule set is so far beyond our comprehension that we can’t even see the whole system at once. We can only experience bits and pieces of it at a time. We can probe the system and it responds back. Arguably, we can’t really “see” the system at all. We can only feel it through interaction. There is an objective truth here, but it is not a set of boolean, immutable facts, it is a force that pushes back when you nudge it.
This is strangely easier to visualize if you imagine yourself as a person in a dark room. You wander around aimlessly until you bump into something. If you bump into it consistently, you know that there is some kind of obstruction. After bumping into enough things, you start to form an idea of what the world around you looks like. It is these “bumps” that form our interactions with reality.
Of course, in reality, everything is a “bump.” Vision is photons bumping against your photoreceptor cells. Hearing is pressurized air bumping against your ear drums. In a dark room, we actively seek out reality, but when we are outside, we cannot help but experience the reality around us. We spend our lives shouting into the void without pausing to note that the void does actually talk back. The void is always talking back, sometimes in complete sentences. Try running headfirst into a wall and you’ll get a very coherent argument as to why you shouldn’t do that.
The reality of the desert is a cacophony of forces pushing back against you, the observer. It is pure chaos, patternless and meaningless, but always there. You can count on this reality to be there, but you will never truly make sense of it.
In a very reductive nutshell, this is what Eastern philosophy is about. It says: “Hey friend, can you just shut the fuck up for one second? Listen to and feel what reality actually is instead of what you want it to be.” It seeks to be immersed in reality, to non-judgmentally observe what is happening.
Unfortunately, without judgment, it’s difficult to really accomplish anything. Judgment is a payout function that provides reality with a spinal column. It shows you what is good, what is cool, what is desirable, what provides status and virtue and money and power. Without judgment, anything is as good as any other thing. You are adrift in a meaningless soup of chaotic forces. Buddhism, Daoism, Zen are data-driven philosophies that, much like all things data-driven, don’t drive you anywhere.
This reality of the desert is empty to the point of being maladaptive, leaving us to look to its counterpart for some answers.
The palace
“You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”
Cypher
The Matrix
The question that popped into my head when I first read Baudrillard’s map story is why the fuck would I ever want a perfectly detailed 1–1 map? It would be so cumbersome to use as to be utterly useless.
Maps are definitionally reductive. The ideal map isn’t perfectly detailed. It is reduced down to the details that help you accomplish a certain task. If I’m driving, I want roads. If I’m hiking, I want elevation. If I’m sailing, I want windspeed. The construction of these maps requires the judgement to leave out certain features and to emphasize others. Incorporating every detail is not only impossible, but undesirable.
If maps are built selectively, then in this reality, our traditional notions of “truth” have no meaning. What does it even mean for a map to be true? Does it take into account all the facts? No. Is there a guarantee that it can even represent them in a way that is usable? No. Every map represents a subset of reality and every map will have edge-cases that it can’t account for. A map that is good for oil prospecting is not going to be very good for assessing rainforest health.
With maps, what matters is fitness.
I’m going to use “map” as a shorthand to describe any pattern you could potentially construct on top of the reality of the desert. This includes the panoply of human invention: language, ideas, designs, mental models, etc. It also includes weather, species, and other non-human constructs.
A good map is a map that survives. It is tested against reality and proves that it can survive in some subset of reality.
Think about the concept of a tree. A tree is not coded into the fabric of reality. There’s no comment in the source code of the universe saying:
# NOTE: This method generates trees.
# TODO(god): fix platypus.A tree is simply a randomly occurring pattern, resulting from the rule set, that has survived the test of time. Apparently, photosynthesis + standing still + spamming the air with tree jizz = success.
This is what I mean when I say maps are not about truth, but are about fitness. Maps are inextricable from a sense of fitness and tests of this fitness in the turbulent world of the desert. This interplay, maps coming into being from the chaos of the desert and then being destroyed by the chaos of the desert, is what drives change and evolution.
Humans, however, are disruptive to this dance. The tabula rasa of our cerebral cortex can encode representations of reality of incredible complexity. This allows us to create maps of overwhelming fitness and harness them to side-step the chaos of the desert. We are so fit, we’ve essentially hit the killscreen on the game of evolution. This is no longer a game we need to play. We’ve instead created other games on top of evolution, games where there is a lot of leeway on how well we need to align with reality. For a tree, the reality of survival is inescapable. For many humans, this is less definite.
As our need to adhere to the forces of the desert is subsumed by our competence at creating maps, our maps become increasingly detached from reality, with little to no consequence. We start creating maps on top of maps, maps that can no longer turn back into the ashes of chaos, maps that overpower the desert of the real.
What Baudrillard points to is that our ability to simulate reality has increasingly allowed us to evade the harshness of reality. This has ironically made reality even harsher and made reality avoidance a more and more compelling choice. At some point our ability to simulate outpaces our desire to adapt to harshness.
This is the map that precedes the territory, the underlying reality turned simulation turned simulacra.
The most prominent Baudrillard-influenced movie, The Matrix, sketches out this idea with the character of Cypher. Cypher is arguably the only interesting character in a cast of automata. He is one of two characters who is actually human, who has human concerns, wants, and desires.
(note: spoilers follow. crawl up from under that rock and watch the Matrix.)
What annoys me about The Matrix is that Cypher isn’t painted in a more sympathetic light. His story is the most human and reasonable story of all. Looking at it from his perspective, Cypher took the red pill and had his Maslow hierarchy completely disrupted: no safety, shitty food, no sex, and constantly hunted by laser octopus robots. When he talks to the agent, he has the choice between two realities, one awesome but fake and the other real but absurdly shitty. Who wouldn’t betray the desert of the real?
Choosing reality can be easily construed as a costly choice. Why dive into this desert empty of intrinsic meaning, purpose, hope, and guarantees? It’s much easier to just take the agent’s offer. In our world, simply replace the Matrix with religious fundamentalism, rabid liberalism, corporate culture, mindless hedonism, social media [1] or any of the other socially accepted constructs of safety, comfort, and meaning.
There’s nothing new or unusual about reality avoidance. It is an adaptive strategy, an opiate for those who want to avoid dealing with reality and taking responsibility for one’s own choices and meanings. In doing so, they cede a tremendous amount of power to those who create the simulacra. When you buy into an illusion, whoever controls the illusion owns you.
The reality of the map is the reality of humans.
We filter the empty reality of the desert through the lens of our brain so that we can channel its forces to our advantage. We imbue this map with the patterns, symbols, models, stories, meanings necessary to survive and thrive in a chaotic universe.
In a sense, we are prisoners in the palace. The map is the only way we can actually experience the desert. As such, choosing what the map looks like is incredibly high-stakes. The vast majority of us abstain from making this high-stakes choice and accepting the responsibility the choice entails, instead opting for the safer maps that society puts in front of us. Yet while we can avoid choices, we cannot avoid responsibility.
Existentialism, deconstructed
“What is that, Nietzsche? Shut the fuck up!”
Detective Rust Cohle
True Detective
If you had to put a label on this world view, it would be “existentialism.” Existentialism is depressing when you read the first sentence: reality has no intrinsic meaning; it is a desert. Existentialism is terrifying when you read the second sentence: you can create any meaning on top of reality; it can be represented by any map.
This terror comes from the realization that anything and everything is possible. There is no safety net. There is no invisible cage. You make your choices and you cannot avoid responsibility for those choices. Facing down this terror without sputtering out in the uncanny valley of nihilism is difficult, but offers you a glimpse of the answer to that fundamental question “how should I live?”
The freedom implied by a purely unstructured reality is so terrifying that we flee into the confines of anything with meaning. In the age of Marx, it was the opiate of religion. In the age of Baudrillard, it is the hyperreality of media.
The meanings provided by society are training wheels, sensible defaults to be overridden by experience and good sense. To win the staring contest with the abyss is to win the right to create one’s own meanings, still ultimately unsatisfying but at least free. If you’re going to pay the cost for the meanings anyways, not choosing your own meanings is what Sartre would call “bad faith” and what my parents would call “bad value.”
The natural follow-up question to this is how do we create the “right” meanings? Unfortunately, by creating your own meanings, you give up any connection to the comfortable notion of “right.” Instead, you subject yourself and your meanings to the harsh forces of reality and return to a game defined by fitness.
Friedrich Nietzsche grazed on this idea with his distinction between master and slave morality [2]. Master morality is morality of nobility. It seeks fitness. The value of an action is derived from its consequences. What is helpful is good and what is harmful is bad. Slave morality is the morality of those deprived of power, whether political, economic, or physical. It is sour grapes turned value system, subverting the master morality to label the causes of slavery as “evil.” Ironically, the slave morality is utterly dependent on the master morality. It is a simulacra, detached from reality and consequence.
If you look at the nature of successful people in the world, what Nietzsche might call the übermensch, you’ll note that they tend to operate by aggressively creating meanings and then subjecting them to the harsh forces of reality. Master morality values such as courage are all about subjecting oneself to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
This strategy is also the basis for the universe’s most powerful shared ideas. Science aggressively creates new meanings (hypotheses) and subjects them to reality (experiment.) Capitalism aggressively creates new meanings (new businesses) and subjects them to reality (competition.) Evolution lazily creates new meanings (species,) takes a coffee break, and then ruthlessly subjects them to reality (natural/sexual selection.)
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. With respect to your meanings, be creative and be ruthless.
Humanity is both gifted with and cursed by an overabundance of fitness. The fact that you can pull out your smartphone and have food delivered to your door with zero effort is a problematic state of affairs. We are given this option to opt out of the harshness of reality by enslaving ourselves to meanings of no consequence or import. We lock ourselves in the palace, with the maps given to us, without questioning whether anything the maps represent is real.
It is important to remember that we can always choose to step out of the palace, to see the desert as it is, not as it is represented on the map.
Whew! Glad I got that off my chest. Future posts will be more fun (sex, drugs and rap music I promise), but this was a necessary foundation. Appreciate you taking the time to read. 20m is actually quite a sacrifice in the world of Buzzfeed lists. <3 for your patience.I want to thank everyone who read the earlier drafts of this post. Your feedback was invaluable and definitely helped me avoid writing some kind of "unabomber" manifesto. Always looking for more draft readers. Wink wink.
[0] He rushed back to the palace to report this. They locked him up and forced him to commit suicide by drinking hemlock.
[1] When you don’t see the point of running two miles without your Fitbit on, something is deeply fucked up with the meanings you choose to ascribe to.
[2] If you can get past his comments about Jews and Chinese people.
