Trump and the Greedy Algorithm   

                In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Aura, he uses the mathematical construct of the greedy algorithm, an algorithm that always points to the simple, right answer, as a way of framing what happens in a society or civilization when the questions that dominate our attention keep producing obvious but useless answers.  What happens is that the deep and important questions are never able to break through the veil of the greedy algorithm and attract the attention they deserve.

                I think we should think of the failed presidency of Donald J. Trump as a greedy algorithm, one that rivets our attention on the cascading decline of his presidency and makes it almost impossible to focus on what is important.  Every news cycle is held captive to the horrific narrative unfolding around this president.  There is no way to know what new low or new threat will greet us tomorrow morning.  It is almost impossible not to watch.  Add in the spectacle of Republican legislators making up health care bills as they vote on them with no deliberation and no sense of what the impact or consequences might be, and there is enough political drama to draw our attention away from what we should be thinking about.  Regardless of what happens to Trump and the Republicans, the only way out of this collapse of the American political system is to turn away from the carnage and focus on what we have to build to combat and replace this.

                I think we should only pay attention to Trump one day a week – let’s say Tuesday.  Every Tuesday we’re allowed wall to wall coverage of Trumpland – like washing down a sugar sandwich with a coke.  One day, that’s it.  After that we have to get back to work.  After that we have to say what should we build to replace what we used to think of as an indestructible political reality.  The world we used to live in is gone.   We can’t go back, and moving forward is going to require us to turn off the nonsense and build a new political alliance.  We should pay due diligence to the legal and political process that will try to contain the damage, but just cheering for the good guys and carrying signs in the streets won’t build a new politics.

                We have become a fractured resistance.  There are more of us than there are of them, but we have lost the knack of making broad alliances that can carry us back into some control over our own lives.  Our allies are not going to agree with us on everything.  They are not going to pass increasingly restrictive litmus tests of purity.  We need to respect our differences and argue for our place in the society, but first we need to build a society that makes that possible.  More than anything else we have to find a way to correct the imbalance in wealth that is killing any prospect of democracy.

                But we must do more.  We must plan for a new economy, a new definition and a new system of education, an infrastructure for the 21^st century, and we must prepare for the economic and environmental changes that will come from changing the way we create, distribute and use energy.  We are going to see massive unemployment as AI continues to change work.  The system we have now has no way to absorb this fast approaching and inevitable outcome.  There was a time when the ‘end of work’ was a utopian pipe dream, but now that it is here in a very tangible way, we have no idea how to act. 

                It is problems like the end of work that make it clear that our intelligence can’t be solely focused on technology and science.  We need to ask hard social, political, ethical and philosophical questions about the new reality that science and technology are going to create.  We need art that will help us imagine what we cannot now imagine.  We are walking off the end of a long pier into the unknown, and the entrenched notions of politics and society we have grown up with will not help us when we take that last step into something new.

                We can’t start any of this focusing on the greedy algorithm of Trump.  He is the joke at the end of the Enlightenment.  The sad clown that modernity was always fated to produce.  If you want to create something worth handing on to your children and grandchildren, you can’t look over your shoulder as it burns.  We have to focus ahead, not with some new sense of progress, but because it’s all we can do.  We can still have Tuesdays to wallow in the mire.  We’ll meet at your place; I’ll bring the popcorn.