Peak Crazy (with Aja Raden)

Is 2023 really more batshit than 1693?

In the not-too-distant future, Aja Raden explains on today’s PREVAIL podcast, diamonds will replace silicon as the material of choice in computer chips.

“There’s an upper limit on how fast your computer can think, basically,” she tells me. “And that limit is based on the heat capacity of silicon. . . . If you picture a little kid’s toy, like a maze, that’s what a computer chip is, and you’re running electrons through the maze as fast as you can, like little Pac-Mans. And the faster you run them, the hotter it gets. And the faster you run them, the faster the computer can think and can compute. And there’s an upper limit on that, when silicon starts to melt down. And that’s the limit we’re at, in terms of how fast can our computers work, at this point. How smart can they be is what temperature does silicon start to melt at.” Diamonds, however, have no such gemological obstacles. “Effectively, here’s no upper limit for diamond computer chips.”

Raden knows a thing or two about diamonds. She’s worked as a jewelry designer, headed the auction division of House of Kahn Estate Jewelers, written a bestseller called Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession, and How Desire Shapes the World, and, most recently, appeared memorably (if not mildly) in Nothing Lasts Forever, a brilliant new documentary about the diamond industry now streaming on Showtime. So there will be a moment, and it’s closer than we probably realize, when the diamonds we carry around with us won’t be on our engagement bands, but in our smartphones.

We recorded our conversation this past Sunday, and I keep coming back to the mental image of silicon breaking down under the stress of faster and ever more demanding processing speeds. That, I realized, is the perfect metaphor for how I feel, writing this column in 2023 America. My overtaxed brain is that melting hunk of silicon.

I look around, and I drive past an ugly house with a huge F*CK BIDEN flag stapled to an oak tree on the front lawn, and I read the bonkers news feed, and I crank out these dispatches, and I think, How can this be real? How can so many people have gone so far off the deep end?

In ancient Rome, and in the various monarchies of Europe and elsewhere, power was regularly given to the unworthy, the inept, the venal, the cruel, and the petty. But here, in the United States, where we get to choose our president, a majority—well, a majority in enough states to win the Electoral College, anyway—allowed a racist, rapist, serial criminal buffoon into the White House. And after four years of his demonstrable failure, ignobility, divisiveness, and lies, enough Americans believed he won an election he lost that they tried to topple the government. And that’s only the most obvious symptom of our collective cuckoo-ness. This is reality? Really? This? No wonder LB and I joke about living in a simulation.

The destruction of objective reality—of truth—is, of course, a goal of totalitarian regimes. Hannah Arendt: “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.” Jason Stanley, a philosopher from Yale and author of How Fascism Works, put it this way, in a 2018 interview with Vox: “[F]reedom requires truth, and so to smash freedom you must smash truth.” This is why we all freaked out when Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts.” It was an ominous moment in our history.

Raden, who writes frequently about lies, cons, and moments of collective delusion, argues that, as far as nuttiness goes, our Marshall amps of national batshittery are already cranked up to eleven. “I think [things] can get worse, but I think we’ve reached peak crazy,” she tells me.

This is saying something. North America has been home to a great deal of crazy since the craziest Europeans that could be found settled here 400 years ago. The gold standard of crazy on these shores, it seems to me, is the Salem Witch trials of the late 17th century. Three hundred years after the birth of the Renaissance, the best and the brightest of Massachusetts Bay Colony—including the president of Harvard, the wonderfully-named Increase Mather—believed that some of the women in their midst might be witches in league with the devil, tried them for what they thought was a genuine threat to their community, and then executed them in horrific fashion. That actually happened.

Is 2023 really more batshit than 1693?

There were only about 200,000 British colonists in North America at that point, roughly the population of Little Rock, Arkansas, today. The residents of Salem were Puritan weirdos—cultists, basically, in the thrall of their fanatical minister, Samuel Parris, who believed Satan-worshiping witches were to blame for all of his community’s woes. We worry today about news silos, but these people had no other sources of information. Throw in some political distress, yet another war between England and France, and, possibly, the dread effect of hallucinogenic fungi, and things were bound to take a bad turn.

Despite the best efforts of Ron DeSantis to ban books he doesn’t like, Americans today can tap into so much raw information that it would require a diamond computer chip to process it all. We can all easily “do our own research.” There are more brilliant, learned people alive today than ever before in the history of humankind, and thanks to the wonders of technology, we have access to all that collective knowledge. And yet, at the first whiff of a pandemic, many Americans chose to listen to some 2020 incarnation of Samuel Parris and go full Salem Puritan batshit insane.

“I don’t think [things] can get crazier,” Raden says. “I think we’re so fragmented, and no one knows what’s real and what isn’t. I mean, we were in the middle of a plague, and people took horse de-wormer until they died. Like, that’s peak crazy. It does not get crazier than that.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S5 E6: Nothing Lasts Forever (with Aja Raden)

Greg Olear is joined by Aja Raden, author of “The Truth About Lies” and “Stoned,” to talk about “Nothing Lasts Forever,” the new documentary about the diamond industry in which she appears. They also discuss “peak crazy,” the banking crisis, Elon Musk and the future of Twitter, the protests in Israel, the benefits of the two-party system, fascism, incels, and the difference between silicon and diamonds when making computer chips. Plus: a little dance number.

Follow Aja on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AjaRaden

Buy her books:
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Aja-Raden/author/B013SJLVJI

Watch the trailer for the documentary:

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Photo credit: New York Historical Society. A black-and-white portion from the 1869 painting “Witch Hill (The Salem Martyr).”