For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

Technologist, off-world colonizer, and Simpsons character Elon Musk is merely the most recent to articulate the radical idea that we are living in a vast computer simulation run by future versions of ourselves. The “simulation argument,” developed by philosopher Nick Bostrom, argues that, given the nature of computer power and its presumed ability to affect and even replicate human consciousness, it is overwhemingly likely that we are within one of millions of such simulations. We’re Sims and we don’t know it!

The claim is striking both for its logical elegance and for its ability to rattle the cage of ordinary mortals. Like debates about free will and determinism, the simulation argument takes our unique sense of self, our hopes, desires, and halting actions, and renders them null. No wonder the scenario is old, even if the computer-based argument is new. The gods toy with us as wanton boys play with flies.

In current circumstances, the simulation argument dovetails with a worry born of more practical struggles in the world of politics. If your previously rock-solid reality as a unique consciousness is undermined by this contingency, then why not by others? The tricky cross-currents of identity politics, where conflicting claims of status and value hinge on race, orientation, ability, or history, might prove to be the birthplace of a world without individuals.

Technologists will tell you the post-human future is inevitable, maybe already here, and that they joyously await the Singularity (where non-human intelligence outstrips our slow biological brains). Most of us are more cautious, not least because we know that the future is always unevenly distributed, and that adapt-or-die cheerfulness of tech-boosters too often conceals drastic structural inequalities.

There are human limits that are not about mortality but are a function of human relations. Claims of political status based on identity have always been advanced to challenge structural asymmetries: exclusions driven by skin colour, differences in genital arrangement, by differences in desire. This is the rankest stupidity. There is a tangle here as intersectionality advocates well know. If your claims to status are based on reversing this kind of discrimination, you run the risk of making the difference itself— rather than the claim to status—the political focal point. Identity politics aims for a day when all individuals are valued in themselves, but those aspects of unique individuality that have been systematically denigrated can become barriers to the achievement of individual value.

Imagine, then, a world in which people do not define themselves by their various clusters of traits, or get to claim privileges based upon them. It would also be a world where some cluster of traits was no longer cause for discrimination or violence. In metaphysical terms, the problem here is not the differential treatment of traits, but the fact that traits are clustered in the first place, forming individuals who are supposed to be both different and the same.

The political threshold here is the persistent idea of the individual as unique and self-identical.. Born in struggles against hierarchy and religious intolerance some four centuries ago (in the West at least), the social-political individual has led a rocky life. It has borne property rights and generated social revolution, but has declined into mere consumer preference or Twitter-Instagram presence.

In a world without individuals, the uniqueness of my consciousness would not signify much, nor would its possibilities ever be constrained by being tied to a stable identity. The “I” of my personal narrative would acknowledge its own fictional status, a minimal ordering principle as it runs one experiment in human living after another. Discrimination would be rendered incoherent.

In a post-individual world, we would really be running the simulations ourselves, using bodies and the material world as test-benches. This would be a post-human world, unrecognizable to most of what currently counts as human life. These are the real metaphysical stakes of loosening the moorings of selfhood. The simulation argument forces imagination to confront its own mysteries, but it does little to advance the issue. Meanwhile, we seem trapped in a different kind of snare, one that is not speculative at all.

The human present is mired in prejudice and evil, apparently basic circumstances against which the best efforts of identity-based empowerment have been only moderately successful. The human future seems to promise more of the same, only with the kicker that we will find new, possibly worse ways of extending inequality by heeding “what technology wants.”

Is there another way? Could we fashion a world where differences really were transcended, where nobody was worth more or less than anyone else, where the ultimate value wasn’t individual identity but the multiplicity of unlikely meat-minds, windowless mirrors each reflecting all the others, making things up?

Oh, probably not. But let’s continue to dream! It is, after all, one of the things we humans do pretty well.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

The world is smooth, like the unblemished body of a department store mannequin. There’s no way in or way out. People don’t die anymore—at least no one talks about it online, so it must not actually happen. Life is lived mainly indoors, if you can call it that. But what a world is at our fingertips! There are so many places to go and so many people to be! Everyone has several identities, so you don’t really know who you are talking to—but who is anybody anyway? Identity politics are long gone. We all know how horrible it was when people like Martin Luther King and Malcom X and Muhammed Ali tried to divide people into groups, to classify them by race, gender, sexual orientation. Now we know that we are all one people; we are all one family. Labels only divide, so there are no longer labels anymore. If you think of anyone as different or “other” you secretly slap yourself. (Ooh! It’s somewhat thrilling …I’ve been bad!) It’s best to think of everyone as the same. We all want love. We all want to be loved. All of our entertainments tell us that.

And how we love our entertainments! There are no more films by Woody Allen, there are no poems by Ezra Pound, and lately Dorothy Parker has been crossed off the list (due to her alcoholism—what a sad ugly woman she was, and so lonely!). It’s not really clear why these people were ever classed as artists, when they were clearly fascists, drunks, and child molesters with weak chins. What made people believe the things they wrote? Why would anyone not wonder at the toxicity of their demented visions?

Everything centres on the family. The family is good. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Fathers still work, and they are still grumpy and difficult to talk to. Mothers still take care of children and push a button that bakes the bread. People look back at that strange, outlandish period (the 1960s and somewhat after) when women tried to act like men—well look what happened! It can all be summed up by two words: Hillary Clinton. How crazy was she? (Pantsuits! Just imagine!) Women want to have doors opened for them, always did, and they want to be pretty and petted and coddled and taken care of. And women don’t like sex.

Nobody does, really. That’s why it’s so grand that there is no sex anymore. There’s all sorts of ways to have babies (How we love babies! How we love to look at them online!). We don’t really need sex anymore. And all sex is rape anyway. Consent is just so….difficult. Now nothing means “yes” because—there’s nothing to consent to! Of course people still play, in the privacy of their own home, in safe places, clean, antiseptic, condom filled rooms, that they enter and leave alone. The rooms where we play are like condoms. Because the important thing is to be safe. “Be safe!” we say, when someone goes into the Condom Room. But we know they will be. Safety is what everyone likes most of all.

No danger, no risk, no fear, no need, no longing, no sadness no desire.

Of course there is talk of … there are rumours of …

It can’t be true. It mustn’t be.

That there are “Cells.” “Communist Cells.” In the woods… where things happen between people. Not online. Not in condom rooms. People say the “Communist Cells” started when people used to leave their houses (after all, why would they do that?) and meet secretly and play games (Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, Hearts) in coffee shops. That’s why board games were banned.

Who needs board games?

I mean who needs other people anyway?

They can just be so stressful.

I’m tuning out now.

Going online.

Aldous Huxley was so wrong. It’s laughable really. (He was a drug addict, like all the rest of those damned artists!) He said that in the future we would all be on drugs.

But our civilization, in honour of St. Nancy (Reagan) said a big fat “No!” to drugs!

We have the internet.