Meta-Realities and Dioramas Revisited
Sweet like Can-D.
[I know, I promised my discourse days were over. But this essay is a slightly expanded and edited version of a post I made on my Wordpress months ago.]
What is a meta-reality in my lexicon? I’ll do my best to define it briefly. A Meta-reality is a state of being in which abstracted communal spectacles and their accompanying reterritorialized significance create a double existence where individuals experience actuality (read base existence and immediate habitat) alongside a heightened, collectively perceived reality that has become unmoored. I will expand on this to better articulate my meaning. Meta-realities are heavily dependent on shared electronic communication, particularly audio-visual forms. This is due to the immediacy of sounds and images through rapid communication. Speed of information acquisition that nears that of sensory input can effectively replace sensory input in a manner that confuses actuality with a Meta-reality. If you can unlock your phone and see a video that alters expectations about your existence in the same amount of time that it takes to walk out your front door and see something occur on your street, then functionally the two experiences have equivalent significance in the human sensory matrix. This results in the Diorama Effect, where an alternate form of information environment builds around the observer. Actuality does not cease to exist, but two different realities progress schizophrenically side-by-side as they vie for control over consciousness.
Because Meta-reality is present alongside actuality, and the human mind craves stable and coherent experience environments, two follow-on effects follow. The first is Meta-reality Synthesis. This is the phenomenon where humans endeavor to force agreement between Meta-realities to resolve dissonance and restore credulity to the Diorama Effect. At times, the attempts to force agreement are haphazard and quite obvious. One classic example is the combined racial reckoning and COVID-19 Meta-realities overlapping in 2020 when it was declared that, while COVID was extremely deadly and going out in public spaces was a sin equivalent to attempted murder, mass protest was acceptable because white supremacy is more dangerous than a virus. In many cases the narrative was synthesized uncannily resulting in statements that white supremacy was itself a virus. The COVID Meta-reality collided with the racial liberation Meta-reality. The diorama was hastily rebuilt with exposed drywall and unfinished windows, but it looked real enough for most people to shrug and go along. The mental distress of exiting the diorama into the contextless void of actuality is far more terrifying than momentary confusion and a little cognitive dissonance.
The second follow on effect is Actuality Synthesis. (These are all my terms. I’m freewheeling here) This is far more insidious and consists of actuality being forced to bend to match the Diorama Effect. This typically lags the introduction of new meta-real spectacles and can come in the form of concrete policies or collective notions about actuality. Evidence of this is most clear in persecution of those who reject widely shared dioramas. An example of this from geopolitics is the American derision toward France after the refusal to participate in the Iraq War in the years following 9/11. France rejected the Meta-reality of the post 9/11 world narrative created by the US government. The American people heaped scorn on them, but the French government was correct in their rejection of this version of reality. In our daily lives, we see countless examples of systems developed to punish Meta-reality rejection in the form of HR policies, unrelenting social pressure to conform with pop sociological narratives, and social media censorship.
How does one identify a Meta-reality and the Diorama Effect? It’s quite difficult now that we live in a world steeped in a virtual reality level of constant information barrage. One common attribute of Meta-realities is that they are often incongruent with their proposed effects and proposed solutions. Meta-realities often seek resolution to a hallucinated problem. Through dissonant “solutions” such as the Global War on Terror in the post 911 world, mass immigration in the post-colonial world, and the entire slacktivism movement of the twenty tens, we observe this incongruence. When you find these clear but weakly justified discrepancies, you’ve stumbled upon a fault line between Meta-reality and actuality. It means that something else is going on, and a hastily designed story has been proliferated to obscure the complex truth.
I got back to thinking about these topics and decided to expand and edit this short essay after re-reading Philip K Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch for a discussion with T.R. Hudson. I’d developed a simple outline of my concept of Meta-Realities and the Diorama Effect before revisiting the novel, but it occurs to me now that PKD’s concepts run parallel to my own thinking and our current collective social media delusions. In the book, despondent colonists sent unwillingly to desolate frontier worlds use a drug called Can-D in conjunction with dollhouse type dioramas to create facsimiles of an ideal earth and then experience living within them by psychically transmitting themselves into the doll characters within. The colonists want to escape their immediate misery and powerlessness by accepting a prefabricated existence where their lives have meaning. The communal nature of the drug allows them to work in congress to move around and undertake certain actions within the diorama. The majority takes over by sheer willpower and determines what they all do next.
When the titular Palmer Eldritch returns from the Prox System with a new drug called Chew-Z, the market for Can-D collapses because Chew-Z offers individual choice, or at least the illusion of it. The user can enter alternate realities and even future possible worlds. The catch is that these visions are all under the influence of Eldritch who can appear at will as any character. There’s an interesting parallel here between the dynamic of Can-D vs Chew-Z and the change from the world of television to that of the internet. Supposed freedom from pre-programmed narratives and the illusion of choice are hallmarks of the internet culture that derided boomer TV tropes while stumbling into a vortex of omnipresent surveillance and subtler psychological control. The diorama is still there, but millions of useful idiots have now volunteered in its construction and maintenance.
How do we escape from the Diorama Effect and re-enter actuality? I don’t know. I’m not sure that it’s even possible anymore. Of course, people can tune out and drop out as I’ve done lately, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Unless there’s a tactile world out there with other people and institutions to house the vagrant souls wandering outside the dollhouses, it can be a grim wasteland at times. Ignoring the Meta-Realities doesn’t protect from Actuality Synthesis. Maybe PKD’s character Barney Mayerson is right in choosing to tend his feeble, Martian garden at the end of the book. One thing is for certain, like consuming the drug Chew-Z, it’s impossible to fully return to how you were after living in Meta-Reality.
Profound observations