Month: March 2025

Describe or narrate a scenario about a pill found a century into a future in which society as we know it has come apart. Your description should address issues related to the brain and elicit feelings of fervor.

The Flippancy Pill 

It’s 2125. Our fractured society finally acknowledged what began with a conversation I had a century ago.

During a discussion about a media bias diagram—reliability on the vertical axis, political leaning on the horizontal—I decided to really go for it. Not in saying I preferred left-leaning news, but in laying out my theory of the fundamental difference between left and right.

“At risk of being reductive,” I said, “the difference is your ability to stomach social constructionism—whether you can bear the idea that reality is determined by social processes through and through. Every time you uncover something apparently ‘natural,’ you can dig deeper and find it’s dependent on social processes. Right-leaning people lack this tolerance; they believe in certainties and a natural order.”

My colleague responded, “You want to see the evidence, right? That’s what left-leaning people want.”

I thought: No, show me the critique.

I was sidestepping the traditional talking point about how the right is rigid and the left is open-minded. Instead, I was saying, “I don’t claim to be less rigid—I just firmly LIKE social constructionism. I find it more interesting, more dynamic, and possibly more humane, though I’m not even sure about that.”

This inspired the “Flippancy Pill”—now neurologically rewiring millions with feverish intensity, making it impossible to retreat to the safety of ego-stroking frameworks. Under its influence, when my colleague said “you want to see the evidence, right,” she couldn’t use “evidence-seeking” as a way to create comforting ideological alignment.

The pill breaks down the arguments that lead to “safety” in your position—that sense of complacency my colleague was trying to goad me into where we both reassure ourselves we’re simply “evidence-based.” What if instead, on both left and right, you had to admit you’re just appealing to WHAT YOU LIKE? “That’s my perspective, and if you don’t like social constructionism, that’s unfortunate for you, because social constructionism is cool.”

Pierre Poilievre perfectly illustrated this divide, saying: “What binds us together is the Canadian promise: that anyone from anywhere can do anything, that hard work gets you a great life in a beautiful house on a safe street WRAPPED IN THE PROTECTIVE ARMS OF A SOLID BORDER.”

As a social constructionist, I can’t stomach this. It’s horribly generic—”anyone from anywhere can do anything”—it’s so generic as to be completely meaningless. Like saying, “Because the sky is blue, I can build rockets.”

I don’t believe hard work guarantees a great life—what you’re born into determines outcomes far more. What if social structures, not natural laws, determine outcomes? Hard work within an unjust system may yield little, while privilege within that same system can produce success with minimal effort.

Poilievre’s statement is an overwrought accumulation of American talking points to the point of absurdity. He’s laying out his view of what’s naturally good, while I’m saying “get with reality”—thereby ironically accusing him of pie-in-the-sky thinking from my socially constructed worldview.

When I first saw that I occupied a small nodule in the network, I thought it was a badge of pride—I’m an outlier who chose different picks than anyone else. But the explanation isn’t so simple.

When filling out the quiz, I only chose 7 tracks. This happened because I included two non-“musical pieces” in my Golden Record curation: “United Nations Greetings/Whale Songs” and “Sounds of Earth” (though how are whale songs not music, am I right?). The reason I ended up with 7 instead of 8 tracks is because the music titles sometimes had different names—an English description versus their original language on the podcast page. It was only later that I discovered there was a YouTube link with all the Golden Record tracks, and these names corresponded to the ones on the quiz. One track got lost in the mix because I didn’t want to spend time cross-referencing names.

So the only reason I’m an outlier is because me and two other colleagues chose LESS than the required 10 songs, and I chose the LEAST at 7. My opportunities for connections were greatly impacted. I think it’s good that the quiz didn’t force you to choose 10 songs, as that would have misrepresented what I thought should go on the record (I misinterpreted “music” to mean only musical tracks and not tracks in general—but I want whale songs with Louis Armstrong!). But this creates a limitation in the network.

This exemplified the fact that the visualization can fail to capture the reasons behind my different engagement with the task, which has significant political implications. When someone lacks access to information (like me missing the YouTube page) or doesn’t have the cultural proficiency to complete something in the expected way, they appear differently in the data visualization – but this misrepresentation doesn’t actually reflect their true preferences, values, or identity. It’s a powerful observation about how data collection processes can systematically misrepresent people based on access barriers rather than actual differences in perspective or preference.

I was in a 17/17 facet group with Sourabh—a lonely group of just 2 people—and because there were only 2 of us, none of the three songs we shared became nodules or circles. At first I thought you need at least three people sharing a song to get a circle, BUT when I combined our 17/17 group with the 29/29 facet group, Track 14 (Melancholy Blues) only had Isabella and me sharing it, yet it was still a circle. So circles must come about due to the interrelationships and connection density. This visualization choice of which selections become circles further reinforces whose preferences get emphasized and whose remain peripheral, which connects to broader questions of representation.

These visualization patterns reveal deeper power dynamics at work. My choices were really established by the task parameters, yet I wasn’t given much weight in this network. There’s no way the visualization can reveal that it’s built on the hidden assumption that whale songs aren’t considered ‘music,’ but that assumption effectively misrepresented my actual preferences and pushed me to the margins of the network. There’s almost a power dynamic embedded in the assignment that implies whale songs aren’t music and dictates what constitutes a music record (spoken word and whale songs cannot go on a music album; flute and drums can).

Also, while the visualization shows our preferences, it can’t show our motivations. One person might choose Bach for his mathematical precision, another because of his position in the Western canon. This small-scale example gives me insight into a much more serious problem: how marginalized groups might be misrepresented in data visualizations not because their perspectives aren’t valid, but because the data collection methods themselves contain barriers that disproportionately affect certain populations. What you’re measuring isn’t musical preferences but people who completed the task “correctly” from one particular perspective.

Tracks for inclusion, with justification:

1. United Nations Greetings / Whale Songs – Voyager Golden Record

The necessity of wild juxtapositions. Outlandishness of project, postulating communication we can scarcely perceive. Information-poor language of gilded representatives versus the impossibly noble, majestic feast of information of whales.

2. Sounds of Earth – Voyager Golden Record

The clash between mathematical precision of planetary frequencies, which could be accused of ponderousness, with the ecstatic simplicity of striking a flint creates a perfect tension. Given broad historical perspective, incredibly over-privileging of humanity’s auditory footprint, but I kind of like that. Including an EEG of a representative of earth brilliant yet absurd.

3. Ketawang: Puspåwårnå (Kinds of Flowers), Performed by Pura Paku Alaman Palace Orchestra – Nonesuch Records

Chimes and chanting – that combination is indelible. Also need to represent symbolic thinking, and this Javanese mapping of flowers to philosophical states perfectly demonstrates our genius for correspondences (though utterly incomprehensible from an intergalactic perspective). Categorizing beauty through flowers – there’s a simplicity of intention revealed there, which I love.

4. El Cascabel by Lorenzo Barcelata, Performed by Antonio Maciel and Los Aguilillas with Mariachi México de Pepe Villa – Bicycle Music Company

Dynamic and great. Mariachi horns sound like the apocalypse; it’s always been that way for me. This music captures how our species races (sometimes joyfully, other times exhaustedly) toward oblivion.

5. Jonny B. Goode by Chuck Berry – Universal Music Enterprises

We need Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry captures frenzied hormonal youth – a universal language of sexuality that aliens might recognize (not that Bach is devoid of sexuality). His music represents both our cultural cycles and primal energy – revolutionary once, now simultaneously revered yet quaintly distant.

6. Mariuamangi by Pranis Pandang and Kumbi of the Nyarua clan – Recorded by Robert MacLennan

Maximum drone effect. Need to represent fundamental gestation periods of humanity, when literally NOTHING is happening. The recording captures something primordial, those extended periods of stasis punctuating our existence where change remains imperceptible.

7. Chakrulo by Georgian State Merited Ensemble of Folk Song and Dance – Melodiya Studio in Tbilisi, Georgia

Indispensable Georgian folk song. Shows we are not above acknowledging our darker, aggressive nature – destructive tendencies, capacity to make beauty therefrom. Drinking and violence need to be represented, puncturing the sterility of space.

8. Melancholy Blues by Louis Armstong and His Hot Seven – Columbia Records

The blues is more than a genre – it’s the definitive aestheticization of suffering. All about humanity’s resilience and defiance in the face of hardship, with a profound emotional depth that transcends intellectual achievements.

9. Mugam by Kamil Jalilov – Smithsonian Folkways

This represents our interpretation of cosmic mysteries – a sound journey into the unknown. Haunting, exploratory quality. Shows long before we actually went into space that we had imagined its vastness through our traditional instruments.

10. Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson – Legacy Recordings

Perfect moans and slide guitar. Is there any more universal experience than isolation? The stark, haunting quality, and the ground – there is no ground in space, yet we need ground to stand on and ground for communicating without words.