Shya Scanlon
Or take just that morning. He'd been riding through a soft, hilly stretch of French countryside, breaking a sweat, but not peddling too hard, watching the landscape go by, some old houses, a couple small towns, bucolic was the word, a beautiful old bridge built with Roman arches, the windmills seemed out of place come to think of it, but peddling along, occasionally forming an ersatz Peloton with other riders, but as quickly falling out of it, dismantling, reorganizing, just feeling ahead for a generous mood, and he'd come to a lonely stretch when who should ride by but Matt Damon. Matt Damon gave him a thumbs up and said, "C'mon, Kirshbaum, let's ride!" before picking up speed, and since it was obvious what should happen, Chris leaned into it and closed the gap, and he peddled like mad and came up right behind Matt Damon, but of course Matt Damon turned up the heat and cranked even harder and Chris fell farther and farther behind, until he was maxed out and then Matt Damon flexed and gave him another thumbs up before disappearing around a bend. Gasping for air, heartbeat fucked, Chris slowed, but he was pleased to see that by the end of the sprint he'd earned his colored socks.
"I don't get it," said Shawna, after Chris had described this little adventure. "Is this a dream we're talking about?"
"No! No no. I'm talking about Matt Damon. The actor."
Shawna was a customer support representative helping Chris work out a billing issue with his Verizon account. When he wasn't put on hold, Chris had begun striking up conversations with service and support techs. He'd read that just these simple kindnesses could bring much-needed humanity to even the most bureaucratic encounter. Shawna was in Mississippi—he'd asked—and she was waiting for an approval to come through on her end.
"It's just that I'm seeing you're calling from New York," she said.
"Oh! Of course, I get it. I'm not physically in France. Zwift lets you go through these different—"
"Zwhat now?"
"Zwift. It's an app that let's you… It's like Peloton. You know Peloton?"
"No sir."
"It's an exercise bike slash game. Kind of."
"A video game?"
"Well, but the people in it are real."
"Uh huh. Sir, it's just coming through now. I was able to process the refund. Is there anything else I can help you with today?"
"No thanks, Shawna, you've been great."
"Say hi to Matt Damon for me."
"Okay, it's not like—"
But she'd already hung up.
Chris put down his phone. "Stay safe," he said.
Chris didn't mind being made fun of. He knew how he sounded and it didn't bother him. Besides, was that really Matt Damon on the ride that morning? Well, yes and no. In truth it had been M.Damon—the app didn't use people's first names—and of course there's always the question of whether an A-list celebrity would use his own name, even if he was on Zwift. But added to the mix was some non-zero measure of potential based on the fact that Chris had interviewed the star for Esquire a few years before, circa Downsizing, where he played a man caught in a parable about hubris. But those superficial elements were just coincidence and thus ultimately red herrings, distractions from the deeper mathematical truth.
Chris made himself a meal replacement and stood at his desk. Through a small window he watched his tenant walk across the yard. It was Sunday. The thing about the simulation hypothesis was that he'd begun to believe in it pretty much on accident. Chris had never believed in anything before, so it had taken him some time to realize that that's what it was, the feeling he had re simulation, the sparky, giddy wellness that flooded his body whenever the thought crossed his mind.
He skimmed a New York Times article about the New York Times video series "Diary of a Song," in which the popstar Olivia Rodrigo, who'd had a hit in January called "drivers license," lower case, no apostrophe, and who had been profiled the week before, was quoted as commenting over FaceTime, "I watch these religiously"—"these" being the "Diary of a Song" videos—by which report the article turned the series itself into the news, commentary itself slowly seeming to grab center stage, here as elsewhere, as everywhere, the cultural uroboros now so far along its serpentine body it was finally closing in on its own head. Chris had heard "drivers license" on the radio and he'd watched the music video, but he watched it again now, wanting to get right to the source. As a song about teenage heartbreak it was perfect in every way, but it felt one dimensional somehow without the critical architecture that had been built up around it. It felt fragile. It was as though scaffolding had been holding up the structure inside instead of masking its façade.
The best show Chris had watched in the last year was an HBO docuseries called How To with John Wilson. The titular John Wilson billed it as a kind of talk show, except that the host was behind the camera, not in front of it. Over the course of season one, John Wilson followed his nose into odd situations while asking often simple questions about the world around him. One of these questions was: what is the deal with scaffolding? The episode had made Chris miss New York City, which he and Sara had moved from in the early days of the pandemic, with its densely layered surfaces in constant shift, flickering in and out, on and off, a bristling pixilation, and it had also made him think of the Steven Millhauser story, "A Change in Fashion," in which women's dresses became larger and larger until they were ornamented domes eclipsing the wearer entirely, women disappearing from view altogether in what upon first read Chris had felt Millhauser proposed as a critique of superficiality, but which Chris now thought of as an exploration of how we're consumed by our own objects of desire.
Chris logged back onto Zwift and instead of "Join a race" chose "Just watch." It spat him out in a place called Watopia, a kind of salad bar montage of landscapes, partly evergreen, partly arid, some tropical touches. He was randomly assigned to a rider called K.Pillage, and the app cycled through a host of different perspectives as he watched: over the shoulder, side view, a bird's-eye that included the feint sound of helicopter blades to justify the vantage. There was even a kind of low hip POV, as if you were riding along in a side car. K. was a strong cyclist. She was passing most of the other Watopians, and because it listed her BPM, he could see that she was barely breaking a sweat. Zwift encouraged Chris to give her a thumb's up and he did so, mildly curious as to whether or not the app notified her that someone was watching her, and if so, who that someone was, and then clicked over to the main menu to choose the socks he'd earned.
It helped, he supposed—he chose bright pink socks because what the hell—that he'd come to believe in simulation through a rational process. At least, it involved reason more than, say, believing in Karma, or taking a Kierkegaardian leap of faith which, from what Chris understood, involved a kind of counter-maneuver to the mind's struggle for meaning. At any rate, there he'd been, listening one morning in early January to a podcast with the author of a seminal paper on the subject, an Oxford philosopher named Nick Bostrom, when, Bam, everything kind of gelled. Yes, of course: we live inside a simulation of reality created by our future descendants in order to run hypotheticals for insight about their evolutionary history because that's more likely than us all being original versions of ourselves.
It didn't quite have the elegance of a book of Genesis or the romance of a big bang as far as belief-systems are concerned, but Chris had nonetheless found it almost comically easy to digest.
He texted Sara, who was upstairs in her office. "Windmills in France? Y/N"
"Aren't there windmills everywhere?"
"I mean, is it a thing? Like it is in Holland."
"You mean the Netherlands?"
"?"
"Holland isn't a country."
"What are you talking about."
"Look it up."
Chris looked it up. How long had Holland not been a country? While he was at it, he googled windmills in France and found a list. Turned out there were a shit ton. But! There were few enough that you'd have a list. His hunch was that some coder over at Zwift got a little extra zealous about them—maybe he'd gone over there as a kid and one had made an impression. Maybe he'd spent his whole life thinking France was lousy with windmills and nobody had had the heart to correct him. That said, surely there was at least one simulation in which France was lousy with windmills, and maybe that's the one they'd meant to depict. Chris went to the kitchen. He'd learned that if you left the meal replacement residue too long it would leave an ugly ring or stain that was almost etched into the glass, and while at the sink he noticed that they'd forgotten to turn the calendar—it was already the 5th of the month—and so he turned it and the next image was, I shit you not, an impressionist painting of a windmill amid a sea of brightly colored smudges. Below the image was the caption: "Tulip Field in Holland by Claude Monet, 1886."
Chris texted a picture of it to Sara without comment.
This was the kind of thing that made it easy for some to believe in the simulation hypothesis, but it was due to a simple misunderstanding by simple-minded people. A documentary had come out the month before that demonstrated this perfectly, albeit unintentionally, called A Glitch in The Matrix. In what purported to be a serious investigation into simulation theory, most of the people interviewed were displayed as virtual avatars and spoke excitedly about the mind-boggling coincidences they'd personally witnessed, the upshot of this line of thought being: no way things like this could have happened in the real world. It was frankly embarrassing, and although Sara had been content to keep watching, Chris had turned it off halfway through.
"I thought those were your people," she'd joked. She knew the difference because he'd taken her through it all more than once, but again, he knew how it looked. He didn't hold it against her.
"Ugh, they make me want to fucking slit my wrists."
Sara had sat forward. "Chris, please don't joke about that. Okay, babe?"
"I'm sorry. I just can't with the fucking coincidences."
Chris went back to his office.
In 1967, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison wrote a memo sketching out an idea about the relatedness of things that appear to be unrelated. A year earlier he'd opened an investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy based on tips from a man who claimed to know other people involved in the conspiracy besides Oswald, and based on these tips Garrison had begun drawing connections between various players in the area based on addresses, timelines and people in common. These connections were the subject of his memo, which he called "Time and Propinquity." The general gist of his idea was that the truth could be revealed by connecting seemingly random events, and that those connections were, whether temporally or spatially, proximal in nature. He was essentially confronting and flat out rejecting the logical fallacy that correlation implies causation. Indeed, he argued, causation could be directly deduced from correlation. Correlation was in fact a kind of fundamental connective tissue by which causal truth was revealed. By which reality operated. When one of Garrison's suspects, a man named David Ferrie, was found dead soon after news broke of the investigation, Garrison was reported to have said, "I suppose it could just be a weird coincidence that the night Ferrie penned two suicide notes, he died of natural causes," the implication of which being: yeah right.
DeLillo famously had much fun with this whole set in his novel Libra, the fun being in part that the connections uncovered by the Jim Garrisons of the world were in fact fictions penned to support an even deeper layer of conspiracy, a whole fabricated scaffolding meant to look like something had been concealed, but whose real purpose was to reveal, to be used as evidence. Chris had always admired DeLillo's ability to advance his stories by pressing forward what seemed to be a logical progression of ideas rather than using anything recognizable as plot. It was as though he were putting forth an argument, a trial lawyer stringing together facts supported by the witnesses he'd hand-picked to deliver expert opinions. We the jury, his readers. Aside from the fact that DeLillo seemed to suggest that reality could never really be revealed, his approach wasn't all that different from the great thinkers of the Enlightenment who'd determined that the truth could only be arrived at through reason and the senses.
Funnily enough, that didn't seem to stop them from bending over backwards to try and demonstrate how both the mind and the senses pointed inevitably toward that which was exactly beyond their scope: the existence of God. It was in fact one of these thinkers whose work, though always slightly out of his reach intellectually, had been of great service to Chris while he was recovering from the breakdown he'd had back in the fall.
A text came through from Sara. "Okay so it's shorthand primarily used by English speakers."
Chris gave that a heart.
Sara was the only person who still gave him shit, and it was a refreshing break from the kid gloves thing. He played the video for "drivers license" again. With some distance from the article about the series that featured it, he could feel the emotion more clearly. The sheer panicky adolescent pathos of a breakup fused with a symbol of entering adult life, the license to drive, of course, but also to feel pain, to heal, to grow up. Though Chris tried not to seek evidence from his own experience to support his belief in the simulation, if there were such evidence to be had it would surely be that everything was increasingly perfect. Every pop song. Every TV show. Every book. The rate of change was staggering. It seemed like just yesterday everyone was still flailing around, making mistakes. How had they all so quickly learned to do everything so well?
In his short essay "The Monadology," Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that humans lived in the best of all possible worlds—that in fact no other alternative was conceivable, because it was God's will. How he got there was of course probably more important to students of philosophy than where he arrived, but it had something to do with these irreducible components of reality called "monads," whose existence themselves pointed to a kind of Aristotelian unmoved mover, the supreme king of all monads, this of course being God, who in His infinite wisdom set everything into motion with some rules that described how the basic elements would form compounds and about how the compounds would behave and the upshot of all this was that the world around us, albeit pretty far downstream from all this decision-making, was entirely as it should be. The fact that we conceived of errors in the design was due to our inability to get a complete picture of said design.
What stood out to Chris while under 24-hour watch in the hospital was that Leibniz was saying that all this knowledge was available to anyone who looked at it closely enough. Leibniz was no ordinary person—he'd invented calculus—but there seemed to be an instinct at work to democratize access to the truth. And in retrospect it was maybe this more than anything else that had primed Chris, that had fluffed him for his encounter, not long after, with Nick Bostrom's paper on simulation.
Of course, not everyone was convinced by Leibniz. Most famously, Voltaire skewered him in what despite being banned originally became his most widely read work, Candide, in which Leibniz was name-dropped by Candide's philosopher-teacher-sidekick, Professor Pangloss.
Chris got a text message from Verizon asking him to complete a customer satisfaction survey about his interaction with Shawna. He did so happily. Every question about Shawna's service he rated 10 out of 10, but questions about Verizon itself he rated right down the middle as a matter of principle. As it happened, Chris's co-workers had begun calling him Candide pretty much right when he came back from sick leave. It's true that his good mood was seemingly immutable, but was he optimistic? Those felt like different things. In fact his mood was largely independent of any estimation on his part about likely outcomes—whether personal or global. Chris hadn't read Voltaire's satire since college, and when he was driven back to it by his colleagues' loose interpretation, he'd found it amusing, but ultimately unconvincing. Yes, the author put Candide through hell; indeed he put all the characters in the story through cartoonishly exaggerated nightmares the intent of which was to poke holes in and generally unlearn Dr. Pangloss's Leibnizian pronouncement about the condition of the world, a world which was verifiably not so good. Outside movement caught Chris's eye, and he turned from the screen to see his tenant marching back across the yard. The tenant was using a route Chris had asked him to avoid, for privacy's sake, but the other, recommended path was inconvenient, longer, and involved using a door on the far side of the studio the tenant rented. Chris had noticed this about his tenant, that he'd start out with good intentions and then gradually slacken until his path was that of least resistance. It made Chris feel sorry for the guy. Left to his own devices, would this pattern describe the man's entire life? Would he end up as some rivulet of intentionality heading toward the lowest point possible until evaporating altogether? Chris completed the Verizon survey and in the space provided for personal comments wrote, "Matt Damon says Hi back."
At one point early in Voltaire's book, an old woman balks at the assumption that she hasn't known hardship and dives into a lengthy description of the pain and sorrow that had brought her to the home she shared with Candide's love interest, Cunegonde. After detailing her outsized mistreatment and misfortune, she hit on something that actually spoke to Chris: the paradox of hating life yet wanting to live. "This ridiculous foible," she reflects, "is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burden which one can always throw down? To detest existence and yet to cling to one's existence? In brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?" Chris knew that, however momentarily, he had ceased to caress the serpent. Thing was, surely it was just as likely for him to be living in a simulation in which that had very much been Matt Damon as one in which it hadn't. For all practical purposes, both were equally true. All things were the case, and all things were not the case, and it was holding these two ideas simultaneously that buoyed Chris, that by allowing for moments of uncanny beauty made him feel equal to the task of navigating the world.
Chris went back to the Times. People were beginning to buy original versions of fundamentally virtual objects, and a GIF featuring an animated flying cat with the body of a Pop-Tart had sold for 300 units of Ether, a cryptocurrency built on the Ethereum blockchain.
At the time of the sale, 300 Ether had been worth $580,000.
Jean Baudrillard had predicted all this in the 80s—the way signs would gradually release their grip on what they signified until everything was pure simulacra without referent, with no underlying reality. He thought of it as a kind of liberation, both for the objects we desired and ultimately for ourselves. But clearly we weren't done with things quite yet. There was still money to be made, and if that meant clinging to the idea of the real, so be it. In the scaffolding episode of How To with John Wilson, his investigation brought him to a national scaffolding conference in New Orleans. By coincidence, a high rise just south of the French Quarter that had been under construction at the time—a building, let's call it under-scaffolded, that was to be a Hard Rock Cafe—had fallen down while he was there. Or was it soon after he'd left? Chris couldn't remember. Point was, the apparatus was not up to the task due to a lack of full commitment. This made Chris sad. It felt to him like they were all so close. What would it take, he wondered. What would it take for us to shrug off this weird and urgent need for the real? Life was so much better on the other side. Life was livable.
The upstairs floor creaked as Sara moved around her office. Hers was a propinquity he could embrace. Chris owed her his life in a way not many husbands could claim, and he was fortunate too that she wore this debt lightly, reminding him only on those occasions when he forgot himself and used, as he had while watching that documentary, a poorly chosen phrase. She was careful but did not coddle him or condescend. She did not call him Candide. Though he didn't often ride more than once a day, Chris suddenly had the urge to get back on his trainer, and within minutes he was cruising again through the French countryside. He knew it wasn't real, that it was just a graphical interface cobbled together with some mixture of memory, dream and cliché, but just like when listening to a pop song all that was easy to forget—in fact, forgetting was the whole point. So he pedaled on, stopping now and then to just take in the view. Birds flitted about. People stood by the side of the road to cheer on the cyclists. The sun inexplicably set and then rose.
In that same podcast interview with Nick Bostrom, the philosopher had been asked what he made of the fact that some fabulously rich entrepreneurs were vocal proponents of the simulation hypothesis. His answer was that people like that might have more incentive to believe in it, because what are the chances of being Elon Musk? Chris had wondered about that, and he wondered about it now. He was a pretty ordinary guy. He'd never invented anything or created much of lasting beauty. What were the chances of being him? What were the chances of being there, at that very moment? Chris soon came to the same lonely stretch he'd been on that morning. It was silly to even consider a repeat of what had happened the first time, but he couldn't help holding out some hope. He looked down at his bright pink socks, evidence of something. A bird landed on his shoulder. A light breeze blew. Somewhere off in the distance, a windmill slowly spun.