There’s an idea known as the simulation hypothesis, popular in recent years among Silicon Valley types, which proposes that what we think of as reality is in fact a gigantic simulation run by an unimaginably powerful supercomputer. The phenomenal world – the objects that surround us, the people we move among, our own minds and bodies, even the very laws of physics – all of it is the result of a godlike machine intelligence running a software simulation.
This is, of course, an old idea translated into the language of contemporary technology. Philosophy has always been haunted by the notion that our world is not the true world, but rather a pale reflection of it (Plato) or an illusion conjured by a demon (the early Christian Gnostics, Descartes). Its more immediate roots, of course, are in a misreading of the anti-capitalist allegory of the film The Matrix. The idea seems to me a quasi-religious response to our strange and hyper-mediated world, to a sense of alienation from an increasingly absurd and terrible reality fed to us through a panoply of sophisticated technologies and devices.
It’s often used, by people who don’t literally believe it, as a gesture towards how profoundly messed up and weird everything seems these days. Surely none of this could be real; surely some sleight of hand must be at play. In this sense, it’s an ironic inversion of the apocalyptic idea: everything is terrible, yes, but the world is not ending, because it never really existed in the first place.
In No One is Talking About This, the 2021 novel by the American writer Patricia Lockwood, the idea is frequently invoked by the protagonist as a kind of shorthand for the sheer unbelievability of contemporary life. “She and her husband would often text each other throughout the day to say Glitch,” writes Lockwood. “Glitch. The simulation is glitching again. This was different from last year, when they would text each other headlines to say Proof. Proof? Isn’t this proof? Proof that we’re living in a simulation?”
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I can’t be the only person who had something like this sense, while watching footage of a Donald Trump campaign appearance in Philadelphia this week, of the software of reality glitching. During the so-called “town hall” event, two people fainted and had to be taken to hospital because of a lack of air conditioning. Trump decided that instead of continuing with the event, he would prefer to just have everyone listen to some of his favourite songs. “Let’s not do any more questions,” he said. “Let’s just listen to music. Who the hell wants to hear questions anyway?” The playlist included, among other numbers, two different versions of Ave Maria; Andrea Bocelli singing Time to Say Goodbye; YMCA by the Village People; Rufus Wainwright singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallejujah; November Rain by Guns ‘n’ Roses; and Sinéad O’Connor’s version of Nothing Compares 2 U.
As all these songs played, Trump stood on stage, his imposing bulk swaying back and forth slowly while the crowd listened and watched, in a collective fugue state of bewilderment, boredom, fascination and forbearance. This went on for fully 40 minutes, the former president pumping his fists to the beat for the faster numbers and doing a strange little side-to-side dance with his palms forward to the slower ones.
Glitch, glitch, glitch. It felt like looking at a political system that had lost its connection midstream; it felt like watching an empire, a constructed reality, buffering.
The general response to this among liberals, in the US and elsewhere, seemed to be that they were witnessing irrefutable real-time evidence of Trump’s cognitive collapse. Look at him up there, they said, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, doing the slow, wordless shuffle of mortal decline. This, surely, is a man who lacks the cognitive capacity and intellectual dexterity to be president, a man who is simply playing out the clock. Well, maybe, who knows. Either way, it’s certainly no more true of Trump than it is of Joe Biden, who has been president for the past four years. It seemed to me more like an open admission, on Trump’s part, even a strange little celebration, of the fact that nothing he might say – or that his almost equally vacuous opponent Kamala Harris might say – could possibly have any bearing on the election at this point. Why bother? Let’s stop this charade, this poorly-coded simulation of a democracy, and listen to some light opera instead, some soft-rock power-ballads to play us out until the end of time. In the words of a half-forgotten old meme, LOL nothing matters.
It’s funny, but also not at all funny. Trump, in his strange customary manner, is making luridly plain what the system otherwise struggles to keep politely hidden. Joe Biden, too, is just putting on some songs and swaying to the music until the clock runs out. His anointed successor is, in her own way, doing likewise. Harris has had nothing of any substance or seriousness to say, for instance, about the most urgent political question of our time: the relentless assault on the Palestinian people conducted by Israel with the financial, moral and military support of her own government. She and the president are working tirelessly for a ceasefire, she keeps saying, all the while ensuring that those committing the slaughter are kept well supplied with the means to do so.
To watch Trump abandon, live on stage, the hollow performance of democracy – “Who the hell wants to hear questions anyway?” – and just stand there swaying to a playlist of his favourite songs is, in this sense, to watch a politician who has done away with the pretence of politics. And here, as so often, he is ahead of the game. What we’re dealing with is, in some sense, a crisis of seriousness. Because there is no sense that the gigantic problems we now face – a rapidly heating planet, fuelled by an economic system based on perpetual growth and profit; a fragile order of moral norms and human rights collapsing beneath a savage spectacle of slaughter – are being taken remotely seriously by any of our leaders. They’re all, in their various ways, just standing centre-stage and swaying to their chosen playlists.