The Rise of the Experts

The New Virtual Dog Fighters

My grandkids will undoubtedly learn about the '20s as the Decade of the Expert.

Throughout 2020 I was amazed at the number of experts that materialized (seemingly out of the ether) to shower us with daily new revelations of doom as well as the approved remedies to the accompanying gloom.

Many good and optimistic citizens believed immediately that all the hardships these experts were encouraging us to partake in were for our own good - others weren't convinced.

It got more interesting and nuanced the following year as new dark side experts found their footing and began discrediting the former experts. These new experts came with their own expert advice and revelations and their mission was to save us from the experts that came before. The cure, they said, need not be worse than the disease.

Having so many timely experts on offer is really the epitome of science in action and we would do well to celebrate that. The fact that only certain ones were approved is kind of the opposite, but I digress....

Because of this sudden bounty of opposing views, the general population of non-experts rushed out (as if to take advantage of a clearance on toilet paper at the local grocery) to choose their favourite REAL expert in order to pit them against other people's fake experts (who were clearly misinformed, if not outright nefarious). It became our national pastime to have our pet expert demolish another person's pet expert mainly as a segue to establishing how truly off the rails our fellow citizens had gone. It was like virtual dog fights where you could unleash your expert and then watch him tear another person's expert to pieces in real time. Actually, it was probably more like playing with those little green army men in years gone by. In the manufactured narratives of eight-year-old brains everywhere some of these soldiers would get blown up by a landmine and thrown down the stairs, or over balconies, while others might be run over with lawn mowers or melted down with a blow torch after a particularly vile napalm attack. In either case it was always obvious who the villian was and in our real-world scenario it seemed the eight-year-olds were now in charge and it was still obvious who were the heroes and who were the villians. We know this because the state broadcaster let us know it on a daily basis. On one side was the mad scientist with no regard for his neighbor's security or for indecipherable mask mandates. This person was usually quite grouchy and obviously didn't care at all about offending people or allowing others to die of his own negligence. Anything this person said was instantly recognizable as complete nonsense and not even worthy of a reply. You could never tell what these guys might say and as a result they never made it onto any kind of legitimate news channel.

The good guys very predictably all thought and said the same things and were also easy to spot because they spoke in high-pitched voices and were terribly concerned about your grandma. Also they never said anything offensive and were kind to everyone (except for those neighbor-hating science deniers who were also very likely racists and misogynists).

For many, it was comforting to have the network of support that we did: the good scientists, the ever trustworthy media, and our government who would never lie to us about anything.

If only rainbows and unicorns had greater staying power and the Matrix wasn't so fragile…