Clash of the Three Spheres and the Making of Digital Order (Part 3)
Covid: The “Data” Game
Now that the Digital Sphere and its West-Sphere allies have gotten their way, the pressure to control “the narrative” over the past 7 years has eased. Angry Republican “conservatives,” full of sound and fury, are pounding the gavel and demanding “answers” (though predictably no real action is taking place). Those who feared retribution are speaking up. The formerly cancelled are returning with an ax to grind.
Many would like to grind that ax into the head of Covid czar and NIH despot Anthony Fauci, who for over two years appeared almost nightly on every media platform conceivable to announce that his decisions were “guided by the data.” This became a slogan, echoed by Fauci’s subordinates and talking heads in the media. “Trust the data, trust the science,” Fauci and his army of experts and newscasters pronounced with liturgical regularity so that “the data” and “science” became synonymous and eventually a canon that was “blasphemous” to question. At one jaw-dropping point, Fauci declared that he was “the science.” We now know that “the data” either didn’t exist or was massaged to support lockdown and vaccine policy. The same “data” was used to shock, confuse, and brow-beat the public into accepting changes in voting laws to permit loosely controlled mail-in balloting and a host of election policies that favored Joe Biden.
Data is a game of statistics adopted by the Digital Sphere and depends exclusively on what can be “modeled” based on what can be measured. Many things cannot be measured: the knowledge limit of “reductionism.” Material science and engineering made its devil’s bargain with reductionism centuries ago. No experiment or construction project can include every variable, but material science (physics and chemistry) and engineering (building and construction) have the advantage of working with non-living “materials.” Once science and engineering drift over into organic “material,” the territory of the “life sciences,” and get a hold of the definition of a term like “health,” the reductionist limit grows into a significant problem. The problem balloons to red-giant size in the area of “mental health.”
In spite of these limits, medicalized physical and mental “health” is where the Digital Sphere is steering the data game. The Digital East is likely doing the same, though under much more central control of the CPC. Witness China’s radically different social media policies (strict limits on gaming for children and no “effeminate” men on television). In contrast, the West Sphere has thrown its children to the digital wolves, producing a stream of observable “anomalies” (increased depression, suicide, and gender and species identity confusion), which in turn have prompted unquantifiable data-driven studies that alternately suggest dangerous pathologies or no effect, depending on who conducts and pays for the studies.
From a deeper historical perspective, medical and life science makes the perfect bedfellow for the Digital Sphere. West-Sphere medicine began with Hippocrates (460-370 BC), whose methods were developed by Galen (129-216 AD), the dominate medical authority of Medieval Europe until the advent of “germ theory” in the 19th century. But throughout that time span, hybrids of alchemy and medicine were common. After all, alchemy was questing for immortality, a quest that naturally cut over into the territory of medical doctors: curing disease and promoting vigorous health (Chinese Daoist alchemists also raided Chinese medicine to chase a similar goal by a different path). It’s no great leap in logic to define persistent vigor as the antithesis of death and therefore at least one key way to attain immortality.
It should come as no surprise that this is exactly the logic being pursued by the Digital Metopes (aka “poster-boys”), who for almost two decades have been feeding head-spinning amounts of money to medical scientists who have rebranded “aging” as a “disease.” But the Digital Sphere is hedging its bets. If the modern alchemical potions of 21st-century doctors holding endowed chairs at Stanford University don’t pan out, there is always the transhuman track, which aligns well with “wokism’s” obsession with equity and eliminating the past. Expanding the medicalization of “health” to include gender moves the data game from the biological to the mental, an area intrinsically inured to “measurement.” Gender is now widely accepted in “woke” medical circles as a social construct that outweighs biology. They have “the data” (but the data is sketchy).
The Digital Sphere’s spiritual center might be alchemical. But unlike the helmet-and-cape-wearing medieval alchemist, the Digital alchemists are wearing VR and AR body suits and visors, plotting their escape to the proposed immortality of the Metaverse or working hand in hand with conscripted medical scientists and engineers to augment and un-fragilize the mortal body.
The part of the West Sphere least affected by Digital’s gravitational field could probably learn a lot from studying the East-Sphere approach to Digital’s efforts to make global order. This will be the subject of future installments.