I doubt we’re trapped in a computer simulation. There are those times that make you wonder, though, like when you experience a few odd coincidences—plus a couple old-fashioned “portents” such as a rare solar eclipse and a 4.8 earthquake—in a period of just a few days. A.I. constantly feeding you things-that-are-similar and things-that-are-connected doesn’t help matters.
A mild version of this phenomenon would be, for instance, a friend of mine a few days ago for the first time using a shopping bag with a French slogan on it and within an hour getting lots of unrelated French-language ads while online. That sort of thing we’ve come to expect—which may in itself be a dangerous form of passivity (I’m wary of a tech sector friend of mine who keeps insisting our devices don’t listen to our conversations, when you know damn well they do).
Weirder is me thinking that actress/podcaster Dasha Nekrasova and I probably have some acquaintances in common and then her happening (innocently) to take my seat in a crowded movie theater a few hours later while I was briefly in the restroom. This was not infinitely unlikely, since it was during a screening last Thursday at Manhattan’s IFC Center of the movie The Beast, in which she has a small role (having previously been in things like Succession and the trippy, anarchist, and CERN-conspiracy-theory-evoking TV series Mr. Robot). Still, it leaves you with that feeling that you conjured someone—and the feeling is magnified by the fact that The Beast is partly about the possibility life is a series of computer simulations.
The Beast is also a poetic expansion of a Henry James novella about repressed fears, The Beast in the Jungle. The expanded story plays out across multiple eras in the film: 1914, 2014, 2044, with some intersections between those periods and lots of Lea Seydoux along the way, plus a dash of Elina Lowensohn—and absorption by A.I. as the final looming menace, the ultimate solution to human conflict.
(Nekrasova made a rather Jamesian movie of her own, The Scary of Sixty-First, about young women obsessing over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. In both movies, you get the sense that even if you’re just paranoid, your fear will lead to some sort of real disaster eventually, or at least fainting.)
An L.A. earthquake in The Beast is a sign that reality, phony at the best of times, is also dangerously unstable. Adding to the trippiness, I recall L.A. earthquakes being used this way in a few navel-gazing films that touched on life in Hollywood, but I also specifically recall some movie or TV show in which minor earthquakes strike like a punishment each time our protagonist starts to realize all of reality is an illusion, or perhaps a deviant timeline—but damned if I can do a successful Web search for whatever tale it is I’m recalling. Maybe I’m imagining it. In any case, about 12 hours after seeing The Beast and Nekrasova, I felt the earth move under Manhattan.
Speaking of deviant timelines, though, the day of the movie screening had already been odd for me. Finally, 19 years after it first aired, I saw the episode “Question Authority” from the animated series Justice League Unlimited, which in retrospect I think may have been the peak of the superhero genre, several years before some of us began obsessing over the bigger-budget, live-action superheroes. (The episode title is also a fine, succinct summary of a worldview both skeptical and libertarian.)
As if the since-deceased Dwayne McDuffie consciously wrote the episode to be the intersection of as many nerd currents as possible, it focuses on the faceless superhero the Question, an intellectual, obsessive detective character who’d be imitated at least twice in the half-century since libertarian comics writer/artist Steve Ditko (who also co-created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange) first dreamed him up, imitated once by Ditko himself as the even more unabashedly Ayn Rand-themed Mr. A and parodied in the 1980s by left-anarchist Alan Moore as the deranged right-wing vigilante Rorschach of the Watchmen.
The 2005 Justice League Unlimited episode aired just as DC Comics’ print operation was celebrating its 70th anniversary by resurrecting the fictional multiverse, a multiple-worlds concept the company had tried in vain to repress for 20 years to create a simpler fictional continuity. In the middle of the half hour, the Question confronts the evil Lex Luthor and threatens to kill him because the Question has seen a computer file of footage from an alternate timeline and concluded that every version of Luthor eventually turns the world fascist and causes mass death.
Voiced by recurring DC Comics, H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, and Star Trek actor Jeffrey Combs, the Question warns, nearly quoting Ayn Rand, that “A is A. And no matter what reality he calls home, Luthor is Luthor.”
Adding to the strangeness, Question was nicknamed “Q” in this series and was an obsessive political conspiracy theorist, 12 years before that letter became the name of a rabble-rousing pro-Trump account online, one sometimes credited with inspiring the anarchic January 6, 2021 protest. In the footage from another timeline that made Question snap, Luthor laughs at the idea that he craves being president of the U.S. above all else, saying that the office is too small for his real ambitions.
And coincidentally, a few hours after I saw the fictional footage from another universe that sent the Question into kill mode, I watched the fleeting moment in The Beast when one version of Lea Seydoux, fumbling in 2014 with a computer in a lavish L.A. home, accidentally activates a file of a cartoon Trump vowing he won’t just become president of the U.S. but by doing so will effectively become president of the world.
Is there any miracle that Justice League Unlimited, though it lasted only three seasons, couldn’t pull off?
That show almost fixed DC Comics’ now four-decade-old Hawkman mess, too, coming up with an elegant solution to the problem of that character sloppily oscillating between being depicted as an ancient Egyptian and an alien Thanagarian even when there’s no multiverse involved, simply because the editorial bureaucracy is too cowardly and disorganized to make firm decisions.
As any sane, intelligent writer could have told DC Comics if they cared to listen, the ancient Egyptians loved the idea of beast-men from the stars, so why not simply depict Hawkman and Hawkgirl coming from Thanagar to ancient Egypt, then being repeatedly reincarnated until ultimately being reborn on Thanagar once more in our own era? And so it was for a fleeting, unusually coherent time on Justice League Unlimited, albeit with a little weasel room provided by Hawkman having possible amnesia. Now it’s all in DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn’s hands. Let us hope he gives a damn.
These musings may sound as fevered and schizoid as the Question’s, but with both pop culture and politics functioning a bit like a giant Ouija board, it’s only natural to try and nudge them both toward some sort of logical coherence, even if that requires putting one’s hands in the gooey pseudoderm that’s the face of reality and molding furiously. Academic, institutionalized science isn’t the only approach to understanding, after all, as even the popular physicists Freeman Dyson and recently Sabine Hossenfelder admit, in their different but still intellectually rigorous ways (my thanks to Chuck Blake for the link to the Dyson interview.)
Where order is arising from chaos, though, there’s always the nagging fear that the order revealed will be a vast, monstrous one, some beast that cannot be escaped, cannot be out-thought.
This month marks the 20th anniversary, for instance, of an essay (in the March/April 2004 Cato Policy Report) by the late libertarian William Niskanen in which he essentially advised our fellow movement members to give up. He didn’t put it that way, of course. His title was “‘Starve the Beast’ Does Not Work," and he warned that you can’t get rid of government merely by continually cutting taxes because it will likely keep on spending and accumulating debt anyway.
The common-sense answer would seem to be to cut both taxes and spending at the same time, preferably to zero, but the moderates of all parties were more than happy to add Niskanen’s essay to the pile of arguments—much like Tyler Cowen’s craven notion of “state capacity libertarianism”—that seemingly advise everyone to calm down, resign themselves to big government’s existence, and learn to be happy working with Washingtonian power-brokers.
There’s even a morally-repulsive organization called the Niskanen Center (which has fired at least two of its directors for misconduct, unsurprisingly to some of us) dedicated to promoting that unfortunate and pessimistic aspect of William Niskanen’s thinking. The Center constantly announces programs it can support and finds vaguely somewhat compatible with a libertarian—yet big government—agenda. How convenient!
But if the rationalists are haunted in psychology, tech, and econ by the notion that some beast we can’t control is rising, it’s not as if the artists are all happy-go-lucky. This year is also the 40th anniversary of Eagles veteran Don Henley’s album Building the Perfect Beast. Malibu-dwelling Boomers know all about looming menace and earthquake symbolism. Whether we’re in a computer, shaky beachfront property, or a web of mere coincidences, we’ve had the uneasy sense for generations now that we may be trapped.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey