In response to the confusion that surrounded the end of this year’s Academy Awards, when La La Land was presented with the Award for Best Picture that in fact belonged to Moonlight, [Adam] Gopnik penned an article cheekily titled, “Did the Oscars Just Prove That We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?” Building on Joshua Rothman’s earlier New Yorker piece, “What Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?”, which examined Elon Musk’s regard for the simulation hypothesis with a degree of skepticism, Gopnik’s frenetic piece takes the analysis many steps further. He frames the Best Picture mishap, Trump’s election, and the New England Patriots’ improbable Super Bowl LI comeback as proof that something is amiss in our engineered reality. “There’s a glitch, and we are in it,” Gopnik writes. “Once this insight is offered, it must be said, everything else begins to fall in order.”
It should be noted that it was a clerical error at an award show, and not decades of unnecessary war, mounting inequality, or systemic violence that drove Mr. Gopnik to reconsider his reality. Even if he wrote the piece with his tongue firmly in cheek, the sentiment of liberal hopelessness that informs the writing reads as genuine, in line with the wishful doom saying that serves as catharsis for the performatively traumatized under Trump. You can hear this vacuous outrage echoed in the helpless online cries of “This. Is. Not. Normal,” which emanate from the same platforms that enabled Trump’s election in the first place. The winking dread of Gopnik’s piece tips its hat to that same liberal blind spot, conceding that while horrors did come to pass before Trump—“wars, plagues, Gilligan’s Island”—the “basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound.”
“America is already great,” as the prevailing delusion goes, and only stopped being so once Trump was elected and the ugliest aspects of America, suppressed during the Obama years, were made manifest. Because liberals have been living in a false reality—the illusory America of progress, equality, civility, and fairness—and now that they have a chance to address the horrors that this delusion ignored—mass deportations, extrajudicial drone strikes, and corporate overreach—they’ve chosen instead a wilder fantasy. They’ve chosen, in other words, to blame the aliens.
(via itchycoil)