Matthew offers a meditation on Brandolini’s Law — “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it” — and accepting the hopelessness of altruistic reporting, whether on disinformation or climate change. With a haunting clip from ex-journalist Dahr Jamail. Also: a memory of visiting a Benedictine monastery, where there were no screens, and where the ancient rule understood that because work is never done, it only becomes sustainable through contemplating time itself. Show NotesPrimer on Extra Corporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)Brandolini’s LawCuomo covers up nursing home deathsSexual harassment allegations against CuomoDahr Jamail and Barbara Cecil on Last Born in the WildernessAbbaye de Saint-Benoît-du-Lac
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality podcast team.
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I hit a real mental health wall this week. - Yeah.
There's a third wave of COVID ripping through our province, and our crony capitalist government just persists in its half-assed closure measures, paying lip service to life and death data, trolling every doctor in the province except for their puppet advisor, leaving schools open, refusing paid sick leave for essential workers, The Premier is a business guy, and the business lobby has him in their back pocket.
They're all addicted to the constant stream of income, growth, and spending they feel comes from God, and can't imagine any circumstance, even this one, which in that old insurance term actually is an act of God, disrupting them.
I knew I was in depression trouble when the temperatures rose enough that it became clear that skating was over for the year.
That last day, the rink was rippled and buckling.
The boys and I all went ass over teakettle several times when our blades caught in the slush at the edge.
And at one point, I found myself lying flat out on the ice, gazing at the blue sky, knowing that the ice was going and it wouldn't come back.
And all I could think of was about how that was happening at the ice caps as well.
Not because it was March, and in the order of things, but because there are just too many of us, and we've superheated the world with our hopes and desires.
This was not a good spiral.
Our sons are doing amazingly well for all of the aloneness, but they really need to be running around with friends and they just can't.
And if I'm depressed, it's hard for me to run with them on the drying earth.
It's harder to be motivated.
My body hurts more.
Maybe I'll try to find some used rollerblades for us all.
The local doctors I follow on Twitter are literally weeping in their feeds.
There are more people in ICU now than ever before during the pandemic.
And I also learned about this ICU treatment this week.
Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.
Or ECMO, they say.
As one epidemiology prof here in Toronto described it, it's basically a lung bypass pump.
They take the blood out of your body and put oxygen in it and then put the blood back.
This is done when your lungs are so damaged that a ventilator can't keep you alive anymore.
So, the idea for ECMO and all of the tech precursors for it have been around since the 1920s, but no one survived lung bypassing until 1971, the year I was born.
And now, this is something they're using every day.
Right now in Ontario, there's 17 people on ECMO machines.
So I looked up the machine and watched a few med school animations on how it works.
These 1-inch diameter tubes are sucking the blue blood right out of the vena cava below the neck, and then pressing it through a flow pump regulator, spinning it in an oxygenator, and then pumping it back into the aorta.
The tubes are so thick.
The scale looks industrial.
It's monstrous, but also beautiful.
I can't believe we've figured out how to do this for each other.
But after I took that in, I had to power off my phone.
Because I could feel the desperation of the measure.
And it also instantly became a metaphor for so much.
How fragile our bodies and ecosystems can be.
How quickly the ice melts.
How easy it is to destroy tissues, environments, and ways of knowing things.
And how smart and resourceful you have to be to repair it all.
And how hard everything is to repair, nonetheless.
And that despair can sink down for me into every crevice of the spectacle, because here's something else.
That doctor, David Fissman, has been doing his regular job, plus commenting daily on Twitter and in Ontario media on how deeply misguided the government's policies are, plus weathering constant harassment and abuse from a growing chorus of conspiracy theorists right here.
Including the troll armies of government supporters who apparently want to get COVID so that they can own the libs.
So, Dr. Fissman is describing ECMO, this incredibly resource-intensive medical tech that can possibly give a person a little more life, but he's also performing something like ECMO in the media landscape, extracting salvageable data, oxygenating it, and putting it back into the flow, even though the lungs of the culture seem beyond healing.
And he's doing all of that work while the propagandists continue to erase not only the patient's body, but also the potential for cultural coherence.
Now, our work on this podcast is not so life and death, but it can feel similarly hopeless.
Conspirituality feels like an endless viral stream, and as it pours through the demographics we know, it destroys relationships, tissues, spaces.
And if you take the time to repair a couple hours of it, you'll blink and weeks will have gone by.
So one case in point is that it took two hours for Jay Brown to let Dr. Madhava Sethi spew all kinds of conspiratorial BS on his podcast to thousands of listeners.
To cover it thoroughly, to fact check and then analyze the influence techniques SETI uses, this probably took our team 20 hours all told.
So 2 hours to 20 hours.
That's an order of magnitude.
And it tracks precisely with something called Brandolini's Law of Bullshit Asymmetry.
Quote, The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Unquote.
So, Brandolini is a software programmer who made his now famous tweet after reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.
So, we're feeling this, and I'm sure all of the disinformation specialists whose work is so valuable to us are feeling it as well.
They don't tend to talk too much about their mental health.
