Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

  Naming names in one specific case—even if that did do more good than harm—would be like scraping off a single scab and hoping you’d cured smallpox.

  But there she is, doing her goddamned best in the center of that shitstorm: Sisyphus, and all those like her. Today she lost the battle, but I know her kind.

  The war goes on.

  Shooting Back.

  Blog July 11 2016

  For at least three years now—probably longer—I’ve been worrying at a perpetually-unfinished blog post that tries to take an economic approach to murders committed by cops. I’ve never posted it, for reasons that should be obvious when I outline its essentials. The basic argument is that conventional attempts to reform police behavior are doomed to fail for two reasons:

  1. the cost (to a cop) of gunning down the average black person in the street is low; and

  2. the cost of not covering for your buddy when he guns down someone in the street is high.

  I don’t believe these are especially controversial claims. We all know how rare it is to see a cop indicted, even when there’s video evidence of him choking the life out of someone or shooting them in the back. The astonishingly high rate of “equipment failure” experienced by body cams on the beat is old news. When you’re used to that level of invulnerability, why not indulge in a little target practice if you’re so inclined?

  Likewise, the Blue Wall of Silence is news to no one. It is very difficult to get a cop to turn in their fellows because their very lives may depend on their partner having their back at a critical moment. You get a rep as a rat, your backup may just look the other way for that critical half-second when a real threat draws down on you. (I once compared civilian-police interactions to dealing with snakes in the desert: 95% may be harmless, but it’s still a good idea to pack an antivenom kit when you head out. No, said the person I was talking with, the cops are worse: with snakes, at least the non-venomous 95% don’t go out of their way to protect the other five.)

  So: cost of murder low. Cost of turning in murderer high. These are the economics of Homicide: Cops on the Street. Seems to me, the only way to change the current pattern is to change those economic costs. For example, what if you increased the cost of not turning in a bad cop? What if, every time you didn’t turn in a badged murderer, you yourself stood significantly higher odds of getting killed?

  What if we started shooting back?

  Not at the guilty cop, of course. He’d be too well protected, too on guard by the time the word got out. But what if, for every cop who gets away with murder, some other random cop within a certain radius—say, 200 miles—was shot in reprisal? It wouldn’t matter that they were innocent. In fact, their innocence would be central to the whole point: to make the nonvenomous 95% stop covering for those “few bad apples” we’re constantly being told is the heart of the problem. The point would be to raise the price of collusion enough make those 95-percenters think twice. Simple economics.

  Of course it’s not justice; you’d be killing an innocent person. But we’re way past the point at which justice should have any say in the matter. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of justice in the number of people who get gunned down by police on an ongoing basis (see: killedbypolice.net). There’s little justice in the statistical finding that on average in the US, unarmed blacks are 3.5 times more likely to be gunned down by cops than unarmed whites (over 20 times as likely in some corners of that benighted country)1. Anyone who tells you that you must remain polite, respectful, and most of all nonviolent while your fellows are being mowed down like mayflies has either chosen a side (hint: it ain’t yours), or drunk about ten litres of Kool-Aid.

  When it comes to game theory, tit-for-tat remains the most effective strategy.

  I never published that blog post. Never even finished it. The solution seemed way too naïve and simplistic, for one thing. In a world of rainbows and unicorns cops might do the math, realize that murdering unarmed black people endangered themselves, and change their evil ways—but if we lived in a world of rainbows and unicorns, cops wouldn’t be murdering with impunity in the first place. In this world, it seems a lot more likely that things would simply escalate, that police forces across the US—already militarized to the eyeballs—would go into siege mode, feel increasingly justified in shooting at every shadow (or at least the dark ones). They’d rather put the whole damn country under martial law than lose face by backing down.

  It also didn’t help that I’ve known some very decent people who happen to be cops—one a 9-11 first responder, another who actually reads my books and writes his own—and while that wouldn’t change the logic of the argument one iota, random assassination is still a fate I wouldn’t wish on good people. Because when it comes right down to it this is wish-fulfillment, for all the economic and game-theory rationales I might invoke. It was born in my gut, not my neocortex. Every time I read about another Philando Castile or Alton Sterling, I want to start throwing bombs myself. (My greatest disappointment in Bruce Cockburn welled up when he back-pedaled on “If I Had a Rocket Launcher”.)

  I want the fuckers to pay, and I know they won’t.

  Oh, maybe this month’s killers have some rough times in store—the public documentation of those crimes was so incontrovertible that the politicians don’t really have the option of sweeping them under the rug. But viral videos of murder in progress didn’t send Eric Garner’s killers to jail. Nobody got indicted for the murder of Sandra Bland. The killer of Samuel DuBose is at least awaiting trial, but given the history of such proceedings dating back to Rodney King I’m not counting on any convictions. And those victims are the lucky ones, the ones “fortunate” enough to be gunned down on camera. What about the greater number whose deaths happen out of camera range, whose killers are free to make up any story that fits without fear of contradiction or scrutiny by a legal system which continues, unfathomably, to treat the word of a police officer as golden?

  They keep getting killed. And we keep rending our garments and sending them our fucking thoughts and prayers, and the moment they block a road or stop a parade or express a fraction of the rage that is their due we back away and tell them that they won’t get anywhere with that kind of attitude. We trot out the same insipid MLK Jr. quotes about the virtues of nonviolence, about peace being the only way to achieve “dialog” or “brotherhood”—as if the people who have them in the crosshairs give a flying fuck about any of that. We tell them to have patience, to let the system work because we’ve got the evidence now, everyone saw it on YouTube, no way those fucking cops will walk away from it this time—and yet they do. Time and time again. The cops walk away from it.

  Why should the black community care about alienating us? Why should they give us another chance to express our shared anguish and deepest sympathies, only to have us wag our fingers at them the moment we’re inconvenienced2? A quarter-century after Rodney King, why should they believe that the next time will be different, or the next, or the time after?

  What’s left to try, except fighting fire with fire?

  That is where my game-theory imaginings came from: not some rational step-by-step multivariate analysis, but vicarious rage. And while I might be able to construct such an analysis to yield the same result; no matter how rationally I might to put that argument; no matter how many of you I might even convince—all I’d have really done would be to craft a clever excuse to let my brain stem off the leash. I try to be better than that.

  Which doesn’t make keeping it to myself all this time feel any less like a betrayal of some principle I can’t quite put my finger on.

  Anyway, I never posted it. And now the scenario’s been realized anyway: five cops dead, six others critical. All innocent, so far as we know (although if they were black civilians, I’m sure Fox News would already be pointing out that they were no angels . . .) All shot in direct retaliation for the murder of black people, for the sins of their brethren.

  The only deviation from my own scenario is that the
shooter didn’t get away alive. They blew him up, used a robot carrying a bomb on its arm like it was delivering a pizza.

  The usual aftermath. People “coming together.” Pastors and politicians urging calm. The same old Kingisms and Ghandi-isms popping up like impetigo sores all over Facebook. Everyone expressing support for the members of the Dallas Police Force, chiefed by a black man who has, by all accounts, turned that department into a model of progressive policing3 and perhaps the worst target Micah Johnson could have chosen. (Although it bears mention that that same progressive chief, and those same progressive policies, are apparently quite unpopular with the DPF rank-and-file.) As usual, none of this seems to have had much impact on the tendency of certain cops to gun people down and lie about it afterward, e.g. the cases of Alva Braziel4 and Delrawn Small5 (I mean, Jesus—by now you’d think they’d dial back the shootings on account of the optics if nothing else). So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

  Except now, here and there across the US, these other people have begun threatening reprisals against other cops. There’ve been some6 actual shootings7. Copycat attacks, you might call them. Or perhaps “inspired reprisals” might be a better term.

  Micah Johnson is becoming a role model.

  So what now? Have we finally reached critical mass? Is this a smattering of isolated blips, or the start of a chain reaction? Have we finally reached a tipping point, will black lives matter enough to starting shooting back? Given the stats on the ground, who among you will blame them if they do?

  For my part, I’m more glad than ever that I didn’t make that blog post. At least nobody can blame me for the events of the past few days. (Don’t laugh—following my post on Trump’s burning of America, I had at least one long-time fan renounce me completely for “throwing [him] under the bus,” as if my thoughts might have even an infinitesimal impact on the unfolding of US politics. Some people seriously overestimate my influence on the world stage.)

  I have no idea what’s in store. I’m not sure I want to find out.

  All I know is this: if we are, finally at long last, starting to reap the whirlwind—no one can say it hasn’t been a long time coming.

  1 Ross, Cody T (2015). “A Multi-Level Bayesian Analysis of Racial Bias in Police Shootings at the County-Level in the United States, 2011–2014.” PLoS ONE 10(11): e0141854.

  2 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/the-bullies-of-black-lives-matter/article30746157/

  3 https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/07/09/dallas-killer-attacked-police-force-known-for-progressive-reform.html

  4 http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/07/10/3796941/alva-braziel/

  5 http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheats/2016/07/08/video-shows-off-duty-nypd-cop-shoot-man.html

  6 https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/07/08/highway-gunman-targeted-tennessee-police-officers.html

  7 http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/police-shootings-protests-retaliation-1.3671806

  Dolphinese.

  Blog Dec 06 2016

  This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.

  —Blindsight

  Believe it or not, the above quote was inspired by some real-world research on language and dolphins.

  Admittedly the real-life inspiration was somewhat less grotesque: scientists taught a couple of dolphins how to respond to a certain stimulus (if you see a red circle, push the yellow button with your nose—that sort of thing) then put them in different tanks but still let them talk to each other. Show the stimulus to one, but put the response panel in the tank with the other. Let them talk. If the dolphin in the response tank goes and pushes the correct button, you can conclude that the two of them communicated that information vocally: you can infer the presence of language. What’s more, you’ve recorded the vocalizations that carried that information, so you’ve made a start at understanding said language.

  As I recall, the scientists rewarded correct responses with fish snacks. Blindsight’s scientists didn’t know how to reward their captive aliens—they didn’t even know what the damn things ate—so they used a stick instead of a carrot, zapped the scramblers with painful microwaves for incorrect responses. It was more dramatic, and more in keeping with the angsty nihilism of the overall story. But the principle was the same: ask one being the question, let the other being answer it, analyze the information they exchanged to let them do that.

  I’ve forgotten whether those dolphins ever passed the talk test. I’m guessing they did—a failed experiment would hardly make the cut for a show about The Incredible Smartness of Dolphins—but then, wouldn’t we have made more progress by now? Wouldn’t we at least know the dolphin words for “red circle” and “yellow button” and (given that we are talking about dolphins) “casual indiscriminate sex”? Why is it that—while dolphins seem able to learn a fair number of our words—we’ve so far failed to learn a single one of theirs?

  I was always a sucker for the dolphins-as-fellow-sapients shtick. It’s what got me into marine mammalogy in the first place. One of my very first stories—written way back in high school—concerned a scientist living in an increasingly fundamentalist society, fighting funding cuts and social hostility over his attempts to crack the dolphin language because the very concept of a nonhuman intelligence was considered sacrilegious. (In the end he does get shut down, his quest to talk to the dolphins a complete failure—but the last scene shows his dolphins in a tank quietly conversing in their own language. They’ve decided to keep their smarts to themselves, you see. They know when they’re ahead.)

  Anyway. I watched all those Nova documentaries, devoured all the neurological arguments for dolphin intelligence (Tursiops brains are 20% larger than ours! Their neocortices are more intricately folded, have greater surface area!). I read John Lilly’s books, embraced his claims that dolphins had a “digital language,” followed his Navy-funded experiments in which people sloshed around immersed to the waist in special human-dolphin habitats.

  By the time I started my M.Sc. (on harbor porpoises—one of the bottlenosed dolphin’s stupider cousins), I’d grown significantly more skeptical. Decades of research had failed to yield any breakthroughs. Lilly had gone completely off the rails, seemed to be spending all his time dropping acid in isolation tanks and claiming that aliens from “Galactic Coincidence Control” were throwing car accidents at him. Even science fiction was cooling to the idea; those few books still featuring sapient dolphins (Foster’s Cachalot, Brin’s Uplift series) presented them as artificially enhanced, not the natural-born geniuses we’d once assumed.

  We still knew cetaceans were damn smart, make no mistake. Certain killer whale foraging strategies are acts of tactical genius; dolphins successfully grasp the rudiments of language when taught. Then again, so do sea lions—and the fact that you can be taught to use a tool in captivity does not mean that your species has already invented that tool on their own. The expanded area of the dolphin neocortex didn’t look quite so superhuman when you factored in the fact that neuron density was lower than in us talking apes.

  So I passed through grad school disabused of the notion that dolphins were our intellectual siblings in the sea. They were smart, but not that smart. They could learn language, but they didn’t have one. And while I continued to believe that we smug bastards routinely underestimate the cognitive capacities of other species, I grudgingly accepted that we were still probably the smartest game in town. It was a drag—especially considering how goddamned stupid we seem to be most of the time—but that was where the data pointed. (I even wrote another story1 about cetacean language—better-informed, and a lot more cynical—in which we ultimately did figure out the language of killer whales, only to discover that they were complete assholes who based their society on child slavery, and were only too willing to sell their kids to the Vancouver Aquarium if the price was right.)

  But now. Now, Vyacheslav Ryabov—in the St. Petersburg Polytechnic
al University Journal: Physics and Mathematics—claims that dolphins have a language after all2. He says they speak in sentences of up to five words, maybe more. The pop-sci press was all over it3, and why not? I can’t be the only one who’s been waiting decades for this.

  Now that it’s happened, I don’t quite believe it.

  It wasn’t a controlled experiment, for one thing. No trained dolphins responding to signals that mean “ball” or “big” or “green”. Ryabov just eavesdropped on a couple of untrained dolphins—“Yana” and “Yasha”—as they chatted in a cement tank. We’re told these dolphins have lived in this tank for twenty years, and have “normal hearing.” We’re not told what “normal” is or how it’s measured, but concrete is an acoustic reflector; it’s fair to wonder how “normal” conditions really are when you take creatures whose primary sensory modality is sound, and lock them in an echo chamber for two decades.

  Leaving that aside, Ryabov recorded Yana and Yasha exchanging fifty unique “noncoherent pulses” in “packs” of up to five pulses each. Each dolphin listened to the other without interruption, waiting until the other had finished speaking before responding in turn. Based on this Ryabov concludes that “most likely, each pulse . . . is a word of the dolphin’s spoken language, and a pulse pack is a sentence.” He goes on to compare these dolphin “words” with their human equivalents. (Dolphins words are much shorter than human words, for one thing—only about 0.25msec—because their wider frequency range means that all the phonemes in a “word” can be stacked on top of each other and pronounced simultaneously. Every word, no matter how long, can be spoken in the time it takes to pronounce a single syllable. Cool.)