Complicity

Each year's end offers occasion to reflect on what lessons have been learned during one’s recent revolution around the sun. Some lessons slap you in the face with instantaneous realization, while others sneak in over your garden walls like ninjas. My stunted development often precluded me from some taken-for-granted-by-most endeavors, like learning lessons, until recently. Perhaps it is the newness of the experience, but I have come to realize that the most important lessons are not just specific to one person or one situation, but can be shared and embraced by others. This is my attempt to do just that.

For decades, the tendrils of depression kept me stuck in place like an animal in a snare. Ketamine changed that, flooding my brain with new neural pathways and flushing away the malaise like a clog down a drain. For me, this experience was nothing short of a miracle, with rapid-fire revelations compounding on each other until I truly had a new lease on life. Freed from bondage I had to learn how to live, not again, but for the first time. Now, instead of resigning myself to how things are, I try to actively work towards making things better. I used to beat myself up over my mistakes instead of learning from them, but that has all changed. 2024 has been a difficult year, and I have learned a lot, but I believe the most enduring lesson from this time is about complicity.

Earlier this year I went looking for gig work, but was offered a full time position, which I accepted, despite the offensively low pay. The excuses I came up with to justify selling myself short were numerous, but I fell comfortably back into the old ruts of resignation. The company was undergoing a furious rebranding, which seemed suspicious, but I managed to curb my natural curiosity for a number of weeks before turning to Google for answers. Discovering that the owner of the company had been charged with some very bizarre sex crimes placed a conundrum on my plate.

My heart told me to quit, but I engaged in the sort of mental gymnastics that people do, telling myself that it was only temporary, that I only needed to stay through the busy season, and that I was just there for the money. The owner was a chubby little Ewok-like man who was unpleasant to be around on his best days, but once I knew his secret, in my mind he took on the aspect of a giant larva with gnashing mandibles hungering for perverse nourishment. An active imagination can be a curse.

I told myself I was studying him, and at some point would publish a novel called The Pervert, about a would-be writer in a similar situation who befriends the boss in question with the goal of writing a book about him. The story would explore how the main character wrestles with the perversity of his own decisions as he seeks fame through the exploitation of his boss’s depravity. It was all going to be very meta, and this was the seed that I used to justify continuing to work there.

The company is a fly-by-night operation, and the whole time I was there the quality of the work they did was an outright offense to my professional sensibilities, but this is what wound up saving me. Every day I would look at myself in the mirror and ask “Am I really going to do this,” as I ignored a million reasons not to and fabricated a million justifications as to why it was okay. That all came crashing down one afternoon when a client furious about the shoddy work we had done told me it was “fucked up” that I’d even work there. With one sentence he shattered the mirror over my head and opened my eyes to the situation for the first time. I drove back, called out the owner, and quit on the spot.

My greatest fear has always been accountability, but once my head was clear, I realized that this was at the crux of the whole, unfortunate situation. I had found it within myself to close my eyes to evil in my presence simply because I was benefitting. Even though the compensation would have been inadequate even if the situation was scandal-free, I still found ways to rationalize and justify my involvement. I was, in short, complicit, and once I could see the whole sordid picture, I realized my role existed as a microcosm of larger societal problems.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s word of the year for 2024 is “polarization,” which, by all accounts, seems fitting. I believe it is time to truly discuss how we have gotten to such a place. A large part of the problem is that we have suddenly been granted access to nearly the full sum of human knowledge in the palms of our hands, whilst simultaneously being assaulted with deliberate attempts to warp our ability to think critically. The older generations used to see The New York Times and The National Enquirer side by side on newsstands, and they understood that one was attempting to present facts while the other was merely for entertainment, but somewhere along the line they seem to have lost the ability to make such distinctions.

The attention economy is predicated on the ability of algorithms to foster engagement. The presentation of information, no matter how relevant, can no longer afford to be boring, as each tidbit now competes with an infinite number of other distractions. Complex issues are necessarily diluted down to simple, incomplete talking points that are designed to inflame the consumer’s passions in one way or another. Visceral responses result in more clicks, which result in more of the same sort of content entering one’s feed. This leads us into echo-chambers full of more discourse than at any point in human history, but dissenting voices are drowned out for refusing to adhere to the ideological purity of the groupthink, and so no solutions ever arise. This ecosystem is deliberately manufactured by the powers that be, as the systems reward them greatly, despite the damage it does to us all.

More passively, presenting content in what is called “an endless scroll” inarguably leads to greater engagement, but this also takes a toll on our wellbeing. People spend hours each day consuming short form content that, by its very nature, eschews depth and meaning, which is often edited together with the same type of rapid cuts that filmmakers have long employed to increase tension in an audience. We wonder why anxiety is at an all time high, and I insist that this is one of the reasons.

Creators providing longer-form content also find themselves operating at the mercy of opaque algorithms, and this has led to alarming changes in the language. Discussing sensitive topics can lead to dreaded demonetization, and so we see “committed suicide” reduced to “unalived themselves” and “rape” to “SA,” which is spelled out so as to not arouse the ire of the algorithm. I believe that watering down these concepts to make them more palatable to a robot, which clearly possesses warped ideas about what is appropriate for humans to consume, does us all a great disservice.

These issues merely scratch the surface of one facet of one issue that we are facing. We are also fraught with perils foisted on us by other industries experiencing the death-throes of late-stage capitalism, which has turned human life and experience into just another commodity in the zero-sum game of wealth accumulation. All of this is enabled by a government that is beholden to these corporate powers.

The worst part of all of this is that we have all become enablers of a system that does not have our best interests in mind. We have traded our souls and sanity for the convenience offered by technology, and rooted ourselves into a position where we are beholden to individuals and institutions that work constantly against our ability to self-actualize and live the lives we deserve. We do the same sort of mental gymnastics I found myself doing when I worked for The Pervert, deluding ourselves into believing that if we just do X, Y, or Z for a little longer it will somehow benefit us, despite all of the evidence to the contrary that we choose to ignore. In this we are all complicit.

The most extreme example of how this all works that has come to light this year is the disgusting case of the so-called “Monster of Avignon,” in which a French pensioner invited people he met on the internet to repeatedly rape his drugged wife. This case presents a stark example of how seemingly “normal” people can be coerced into perpetrating unspeakable evils with just the merest encouragement via the wrong kind of engagement. This is the epitome of complicity and we can all learn from it, especially by paying close attention to the excuses offered by the dozens of defendants who somehow seem to think that pleading ignorance, even if that were true, which it isn’t, will somehow absolve them.

Contrast that with the public’s response to the recent assassination of a healthcare CEO. That the shooter has become regarded as a folk-hero in the wake of the shooting cannot be ignored. This sentiment has cut across partisan ideological lines, and I believe that the outpouring of sympathy for him is because he is seen not only as someone who removed one of the perpetrators of the sort of mundane but crushing evils we have resigned ourselves into believing we must abide, but also because he stepped out of the role of being a complicit member of the herd and took direct action that seemingly benefits us all, even if that just means striking fear into the hearts of those whose policies and greed crushes us from above, at the cost of his own freedom.

So what must we do? First and foremost we must reestablish our ability to think critically. The advent of AI will soon present all of us with various versions of reality that will be, upon initial examination, indistinguishable from actual reality. There will be fake news, bent news, cleverly edited news, and it will all present “facts” that will be hard to disbelieve. There will be AI troll bots that will digest the entirety of all the content you’ve ever put online and craft responses to your posts that are so tailored to offending your sensibilities that you will feel obligated to engage with it. There will be lies upon lies upon lies upon lies. We are in Plato’s Cave and the moment of reckoning is upon each of us.

We must find new Faiths. It is time to abandon the institutions and power-structures that have long deluded us into believing that the conveniences they offer are worth the tolls they take on us, that the consequences to our health and wellbeing are negligible, and that the safety they provide outweigh the dangers they pose. The longer we wait for them to change and start working for us, as they have all promised they will do, the longer we extend the current suffering.

Amidst all the calls for action, I believe a meta-analysis of the situation requires, in concert with other approaches, a call to anti-inaction by acknowledging the measure of complicity we all bear for perpetuating these systems by believing that we must operate within their parameters, instead of creating new, better, more functional and self-aware systems. It is my most sincere hope that 2025 is the year in which we collectively stand up and strike back against those who are responsible for the reprehensible state of things. We will never have a better opportunity.