Pete Chambers has coined ‘3SD’ to describe conditions in 2025: Surreal, Stubborn, Stupid + Dangerous, Destructive, Dumb. He eloquently describes these conditions at length here. The quotes below are taken from a pair of recently published notes on involution and simulation.
It’s interesting to notice the paradox ruling the past decade: that nothing has changed and everything has gotten much worse.
By 2025 I regard involution as a master process, maybe it’s the master process now.
From universities to corporations and whole countries, many of our most important institutions are run by emotionally immature sociopaths, malignant narcissists, paranoid weirdos, and Swedish Chef-level nincompoops, who enjoy the strange halo of immunity befitting the involuted culture in which their MO thrives. All around me, I noticed how intelligence and care tends to get ignored or swamped by stupidity, and the responsible and good faith actors in my midst tend to be taxed by drudgery or undermined by all the ambient shitness that abounds – most of it going uncensuredly on its morally indifferent way. In an involuted world, to the beanbag goes the spoils.
There’s no shortage of reasons how and why it got this bad; there’s never any shortage of causes (Koselleck). Actually, what would be healthy and feel good to acknowledge is just how ‘well supplied’ we are with dangerous stupidity and moral indifference of all kinds…
High-speed networked computing and algorithmic data processing could be so amazing; instead we have this. I see Silicon Valley’s big foist of all these AI-powered gizmos as the coercive imposition of a dependency-creating future, which we’re induced to focus on while the actual-real world suffers terribly, without us giving it our proper share of loving care and attention. To me this amounts to a bad trade in exchange for a shitty future, one that lines up perfectly with the power, interest, values, ideology, and vision of ‘what we should want’ that’s pervasive among tech bros now.
Simulation is at the heart of all of Silicon Valley’s fears and fantasies and failures, all its hopes and dreams. … This is the key point I’m bending toward here: say what you will about the postwar dominated by the US’ victory in ‘45, neoliberalisation from ‘73, the end of the Cold War from ’89, America is now pinning everything on simulation…
The trouble is scale, and how the stake in simulation’s pervasion is raised when we shift to the cumulative-collective.
Like so many facets of this debounded community of fate we share, and the piped societies in which we live, our pervasive indulgence of the kinds of violent, sexual, and sexually violent simulations we go for is maybe not ‘okay’ at the collective and cumulative level, actually…
when nearly a whole culture loses itself in its enacted desire and preference for simulation, we not only face a collective loss of world and solidarity, but also the eventual general disorientation of no longer knowing how to parse a given reality from its simulation, and the moral indifference at realising all-too-late that reality has been completely evacuated and annulled, and that this really mattered, was what really was what mattered, all along.
By 2025, after living, thinking and feeling this thought through for four decades, I now say all this with a fair degree of confidence. All this porn and gaming, all these head-shredding scroll holes, all the 8 hours a day we do on our phones for the corporations: it matters, and it’s wrecked a lot of us a lot. After decades of indulging it, it turns out that our preference and desire for simulation might be among the main reasons we now cannot face our real problems (and start feeling we don’t have to, as well as ‘can’t even’): climate change, institutional corruption, societal involution.
The world is all happening; we’re missing the world happening, but we don’t miss the world, because we’re preoccupied with simulations. We are a species that worries about the flying killer robots we nonetheless try so desperately to invent, while something as prosaic as an algae or virus unfolds its microscopic doom in bloom – for all of us.
For more, check PC’s substack, living together, somehow