Today’s episode is guest hosted by Jason Schneiderman.

Transcript

I’m Jason Schneiderman and this is The Slowdown.

As a kid I loved science fiction. I grew up reading short stories by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, and watching Doctor Who and the Twilight Zone. I saw science fiction as a series of thought experiments, a way to talk about the world’s problems at an emotional remove. Star Trek addressed race in America in the 1960s so powerfully that when Nichelle Nichols, who was playing science officer Lt. Uhura, told Martin Luther King Jr. that she wished she could be marching with him, he replied, “You are marching. You are reflecting what we are fighting for.” He convinced her to stay on the show — so that millions of Americans would tune in each week to see a black woman on the bridge of a Utopian and egalitarian future.

But lately it feels like those liberating thought experiments designed to help us toward a better way of being in the world have calcified into something dystopian and cruel. When the Matrix first came out, I understood it as a film about refusing forms of dehumanizing technology in order to embrace a spirit of loving engagement and community. Now the Matrix has become shorthand for the inevitability of a dystopian future, and the phrase “red pill” is code not for critically rethinking our society, but a kind of wholesale embrace of a cruel form of groupthink that masquerades as individuality.

At the center of the Matrix is the idea that contemporary life is actually a computer simulation, and today’s whip-smart poem takes that idea as its starting point. Its observations are delivered in a style that is as trenchant as it is funny, while the speaker’s voice remains conversational and charismatic. The speaker looks at the oddly contemporary problem of people who can’t tell the difference between life and art. Instead of asking how can this help us rethink our reality, they ask what if it were real?

Simulation Theory
by Leigh Stein

Before all the gyms closed, I ran on the treadmill
and listened to a podcast about the likelihood

we’re living in a sophisticated simulation,
one among many, our lives a research project

run by our own brilliant descendants
to find out how history might have turned

on different axes: What if Hitler won, etc.
You already know which what if we’re in.

It would be dangerous to search for glitches
to prove the simulation is real,

says Preston Greene. Imagine a clinical trial,
if your subject figured out she’s on the placebo.

You’d have to kill the trial.
We don’t want researchers of the future

to annihilate our reality, but Preston,
what if that’s what they’re doing already?

The longer I live indoors, experiencing the outside
world through screens, the more plausible

the simulation theory seems.
It’s somehow easier to imagine

a sadist in 2420 pushing a button
that says ADD PLAGUE and see what happens

to protest than it is to watch our demagogue
hold a Bible like a block of government cheese

and admit there’s no master plan
other than to threaten more violence

against the people marching to stop
it. I’d like to speak to the manager

of this simulation. I’d like someone to tell me
how to prepare for what comes next.

“Simulation Theory” by Leigh Stein from WHAT TO MISS WHEN © 2021 Leigh Stein. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Soft Skull Press.