by Neil Clarke
Projects that received the attention of Empathium users would no doubt attract a great deal of media interest, drawing in reporters and observers. Empathium was going to direct not just charitable giving, but the gaze of the world.
The #empathium invite-only channel was filling up with debate.
NoFFIA>: This is a ruse by the big charities. They’re going to play the Emp-accumulation game and force the network into funding their pet projects.
NT>: What makes you think they can? The oracle system only rewards results. If you don’t think traditional charities know what they’re doing, they won’t have any better way of identifying deserving good projects. The network will force them to fund projects the Emp-holders as a whole think are deserving.
Anony>: Traditional charities have access to publicity channels most don’t. The other Emp-holders are still people. They’ll be swayed.
NT>: Not everyone is as affected by traditional media as you think, especially when you leave the bubble you USians live in. I think this is a level playing field.
Jianwen watched the debate but didn’t participate. As the creator of Empathium, she understood that the invisible reputation attached to her username meant that anything she said could disproportionately influence and distort debate. That was the way humans worked, even when they were talking through scrolling text attributed to pseudonymous electronic identities.
But she wasn’t interested in debate. She was interested in action. The participation of the traditional charities on Empathium had been what she had hoped and planned for all along, and now was the time for her to implement the second step.
She brought up a terminal window and began a new submission to the Empathium network. The Muertien VR file itself was too large to be directly incorporated into a block, so it would have to be distributed via peer-to-peer sharing. But the signature that authenticated the file and prevented tampering would become part of the blockchain and be distributed to all the users of Empathium and all the Emp-holders.
Maybe even hard-nosed Sophia.
The fact that the submitter of the file was Jianwen (or more precisely, the user ID of Empathium’s creator, which no one knew was Jianwen in real life) would give it a burst of initial interest, but everything after that was out of her hands.
She did not believe in conspiracies. She was counting on the angels of human nature.
She pressed SEND, sat back, and waited.
As the Jeep wound its way through the jungle over the muddy, mountainous road near the China-Myanmar border, Sophia dozed.
How did we get here?
The madness of the world was both so unpredictable and so inevitable.
As she had predicted, the field expertise of Refugees Without Borders quickly made the corporate Empathium account one of the most powerful Emp-holders on the network. Her judgment was deemed infallible, guiding the network to disburse funds to needy groups and proposed projects that made sense. The board was very pleased with her work.
But then, that damned VR and others like it began to show up on the network.
The VR experiences spoke to the interactors in a way that words and photos and videos could not. Walking for miles barefoot through a war-torn city, seeing dismembered babies and mothers scattered around you, being interrogated and menaced by men and boys with machetes and guns . . . the VR experiences left the interactors shaken and overwhelmed. Some had been hospitalized.
Traditional media, bound by old-fashioned ideas about decency and propriety, could not show images like these and refused to engage in what they viewed as pure emotional manipulation.
Where’s the context? Who’s the source? demanded the spurned pundits. Real journalism requires reflection, requires thought.
We don’t remember much reflection from you when you advocated war based on pictures you printed, replied the hive mind of Emp-holders. Are you just annoyed that you aren’t in charge of our emotions anymore?
The pervasive use of encryption on Empathium meant that most censorship techniques were useless, and so the Emp-holders were exposed to stories they had heretofore been sheltered from. They voted for the attached projects, their hearts pounding, their breathing ragged, their eyes blurred by rage and sorrow.
Activists and propagandists soon realized that the best way to get their causes funded was to participate in the VR arms race. And so governments and rebels competed in creating compelling VR experiences that forced the interactors into their perspective, obliged them to empathize with their side.
Mass graves filled with refugees who had starved to death in Yemen. Young women marching to support Russia gunned down by Ukrainian soldiers. Ethnic minority children running naked through streets as their homes were set on fire by Myanmar government soldiers . . .
Funding began to flow to groups that the news had forgotten or portrayed as the side undeserving of sympathy. In VR, one minute of their anguish spoke louder than ten thousand words in op-eds in respected newspapers.
“This is the commodification of pain!” Ivy-educated bloggers wrote in earnest think pieces. “Isn’t this yet another way for the privileged to exploit the suffering of the oppressed to make themselves feel better?”
“Just as a photograph can be framed and edited to lie, so can VR,” the media- and cultural-studies commentariat wrote. “VR is so heavily engineered that we have not yet reached consensus on what the meaning of ‘reality’ in this medium is.”
“This is a threat to our national security,” fretted the senators who demanded that Empathium be shut down. “They could be diverting funding to groups hostile to our national interest.”
“You’re simply terrified that you’re being disintermediated from your positions of undeserved authority,” jeered the Empathium users, hidden behind anonymous, encrypted accounts. “This is a real democracy of empathy. Deal with it.”
A consensus of feelings had replaced the consensus of facts. The emotional labor of vicarious experience through virtual reality had replaced the physical and mental work of investigation, of evaluating costs and benefits, of exercising rational judgment. Once again, proof-of-work was used to guarantee authenticity, just a different kind of work.
Maybe the reporters and senators and diplomats and I could make our own VR experiences, Sophia thought as she was jostled awake in the back of the Jeep. Too bad it’s hard to make the unglamorous but necessary work of truly understanding a complex situation compelling. . .
She looked outside the window. They were passing through a refugee camp in Muertien. Men, women, and children, most of them Chinese in physical appearance, looked back at the passengers in the Jeep numbly. Their expressions were familiar to Sophia; she had seen the same despondency on the faces of refugees everywhere in the world.
The successful funding of the Muertien project had been a massive blow to Sophia and Refugees Without Borders. She had voted against it, but the other Emp-holders had overwhelmed her, and overnight Sophia had lost 10 percent of her Emps. Other VR-propelled projects subsequently achieved funding despite her objection, eroding Sophia’s Emp account even further.
Faced with an outraged board, she had come here to find some way to discredit the Muertien project, to show that she had been right.
On the way to Muertien from Yangon, she had spoken to the one staffer Refugees Without Borders posted there and several Western reporters stationed in the country. They had confirmed the consensus back in D.C. She knew that the refugee situation was one largely created by the rebels. The population of Muertien, mostly ethnic Han Chinese, did not get along well with the majority Bamar in the central government. The rebels had attacked the government forces and then tried to fade into the civilian population. The government had little choice but to resort to violence, lest the country’s young democracy suffer a setback and Chinese influence extend into the heart of Southeast Asia. Regretful incidents no doubt occurred, but the vast majority of the fault lay on the side of the rebels. Funding them would only escalate the conflict.<
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But this kind of punditry, of explaining geopolitics, was anathema to the Emp-holders. They did not want lectures; they were persuaded by the immediacy of suffering.
The Jeep stopped. Sophia got out with her interpreter. She adjusted the neckband she wore—it was a prototype the tech CEO had gotten for her from Canon Virtual. The air was humid, hot, drenched with the smell of sewage and decay. She should have been expecting that, she supposed, but somehow she hadn’t thought about how things would smell here back in her D.C. office.
She was about to approach a leery-looking young woman in a flower-print blouse when a man shouted angrily. She turned to look at him. He was pointing at her and screaming. The crowd around him stopped moving to stare at her. The air felt tense.
There was a gun in his other hand.
Part of the goal of the Muertien project had been to fund groups willing to smuggle weapons across the Chinese border into the hands of the refugees. Sophia knew that. I’m going to regret coming here without an armed escort, aren’t I?
Then she heard the rumbling of vehicles approaching in the jungle. A loud whine overhead was followed by an explosion. Staccato gunshots erupted so near that they had to be coming from inside the camp.
Sophia was shoved to the ground as the crowd around her exploded into chaos, screaming and dashing every which way. She wrapped her arms protectively around her neck, around the cameras and microphones, but panicked feet stomped over her torso, making her gasp and loosening her arms. The camera-studded neckband fell and rolled away in the dirt, and she reached for it, careless of her own safety. Just before her grasping fingers reached the band, a booted foot crushed her hand with a sickening crunch. She cursed, and someone running by kicked her in the head.
She faded into unconsciousness.
A splitting headache. Overhead the sky is close at hand and orange, cloudless.
The surface under me feels hard and sandy.
I’m inside a VR experience, aren’t I? Am I Gulliver, looking up at the Lilliputian sky?
The sky turns and sways, and even though I’m lying down, I feel like I’m falling.
I want to throw up.
“Close your eyes until the vertigo passes,” a voice says. The timbre and cadence are familiar, but I can’t quite place who it is. I just know I haven’t heard it in a while. I wait until the dizziness fades. Only then do I notice the unyielding lump of the data recorder poking into my back, where it’s held in place by tape. Relief floods through me. The cameras may be gone, but the most important piece of equipment has survived the ordeal.
“Here, drink,” the voice says.
I open my eyes. I struggle to sit up and a hand reaches out to support me between my shoulder blades. It’s a small, strong hand, the hand of a woman. A canteen materializes before my face in the dim light, a chiaroscuro. I sip. I hadn’t realized how thirsty I am.
I look up at the face behind the canteen: Jianwen.
“What are you doing here?” I ask. Everything still seems so unreal, but I’m beginning to realize that I’m inside a tent, probably one of the tents I saw earlier in the camp.
“The same thing brought both of us here,” says Jianwen. After all these years, she hasn’t changed much: still that hard, no-nonsense demeanor, still that short-cropped hair, still that set to her jaw, challenging everything and everyone.
She just looks leaner, drier, as if the years have wrung more gentleness out of her.
“Empathium. I made it, and you want to break it.”
Of course, I should have known. Jianwen always disliked institutions, thought it best to disrupt everything.
It’s still nice to see her.
Our first year in college, I wrote a story for the school paper about a sexual assault at a final club party. The victim wasn’t a student, and her account was later discredited. Everyone condemned my work, calling me careless, declaring that I had allowed the desire for a good story get in the way of facts and analysis. Only I knew that I hadn’t been wrong: the victim had only recanted under pressure, but I had no proof. Jianwen was the only one who stuck by me, defending me at every opportunity.
“Why do you trust me?” I had asked her at the time.
“It’s not something I can explain,” she replied. “It’s a feeling. I heard the pain in her voice . . . and I know you did too.”
That was how we became close. She was someone I could count on in a fight.
“What happened out there?” I ask.
“That depends on who you talk to. This won’t show up in the news in China at all. If it shows up in the U.S., it will be misrepresented as another minor skirmish between the government and the rebels, whose guerrilla fighters disguised themselves as refugees, forcing the government to retaliate.”
This has always been her way. Jianwen sees the corruption of the truth everywhere, but she won’t tell you what she thinks the truth is. I suppose she got into the habit from her time in America to avoid arguments.
“And what will Empathium users think?” I ask.
“They’ll see more children being blown up by bombs and women being gunned down by soldiers as they ran.”
“Did the rebels or the government fire the first shot?”
“Why does that matter? The consensus in the West will always be that the rebels fired the first shot—as if that determines everything. You’ve already decided on the story, and everything else is just support.”
“I get it,” I say. “I understand what you’re trying to do. You think there’s not enough attention being paid to the refugees in Muertien, and so you’re using Empathium to publicize their plight. You’re emotionally attached to these people because they look like you—”
“Is that really what you think? You think I’m doing this because they’re ethnically Han Chinese?” She looks at me, disappointed.
She can look at me however she likes, but the intensity of her emotion gives her away. In college I remember her working hard to raise money for the earthquake in China, when we were both still trying to pick concentrations; I remember her holding a candlelight vigil for both the Uighurs and the Han who had died in Ürümqi the next summer, when we stayed on campus together to edit the student course-evaluation guide; I remember how once in class she had refused to back down as a white man twice her size loomed over her, demanding that she accept that China was wrong to fight the Korean War.
“Hit me if you want,” she had said, her voice steady. “I’m not going to desecrate the memory of the men and women who died so that I could be born. MacArthur was going to drop atomic bombs on Beijing. Is that really the kind of empire you want to defend?”
Some of our friends in college thought of Jianwen as a Chinese nationalist, but that’s not quite right. She dislikes all empires because to her, they are the ultimate institutions, with deadly concentration of power. She doesn’t think the American empire is any more worthy of support than the Russian one or the Chinese one. As she put it, “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.”
She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of flawed institutions that could be perfected.
“You are letting your passion overcome reason,” I say. I know that persuasion is useless but I can’t help trying. If I don’t hold on to faith in reason, I have nothing. “A powerful China with influence in Myanmar is bad for world peace. American preeminence must—”
“And so you think it’s all right for the people of Muertien to be ethnically cleansed to preserve the stability of the regime in Naypyidaw, to uphold the Pax Americana, to cement the ramparts of an American empire with their blood.”
I wince. She’s always been careless with her words. “Don’t exaggerate. The ethnic conflict here, if not contained, will lead to more Chinese adventurism and influence. I’ve talked to many in Yongan. They don’t want the Chinese here.”
“And you think
they want the Americans here, telling them what to do?” Contempt flares in her voice.
“A choice between the lesser of two evils,” I concede. “But more Chinese involvement will provoke more American anxiety, and that will only intensify the geopolitical conflict you dislike so much.”
“People here need Chinese money for their dams. Without development, they can’t solve any of the problems they have—”
“Maybe the developers want that,” I say, “but the common people don’t.”
“Who are these common people in your imagination?” she asks. “I’ve talked to many here in Muertien. They say that the Bamars don’t want the dams built where they are, but they’ll be happy to have them built here. That’s what the rebels are fighting for, to preserve their autonomy and the right to control their land. Isn’t self-determination something you value and care about? How does letting soldiers kill children lead to a better world?”
We can go on like this forever. She can’t see the truth because she’s in too much pain.
“You’ve been blinded by the pain of these people,” I say. “And now you want the rest of the world to suffer the same fate. Through Empathium, you’ve bypassed the traditional filters of institutional media and charities to reach individuals. But the experience of having children and mothers die right next to them is too overwhelming for most to think through the complicated implications of the events that led to these tragedies. The VR experiences are propaganda.”
“You know as well as I do that the Muertien VR isn’t fake.”
I know what she says is true. I’ve seen people die around me, and even if that VR was doctored or divorced from context, enough of it was true to make the rest not matter. The best propaganda is often true.
But there’s a greater truth she doesn’t see. Just because something happened doesn’t make it a decisive fact; just because there’s suffering doesn’t mean there is always a better choice; just because people die doesn’t mean we must abandon greater principles. The world isn’t always black and white.