Holographic Principle
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HOLOGRAPHIC PRINCIPLE*
[A photograph of the inside of a very clean white fridge, filled with stacked vegetables, pre-packaged chopped leafy greens, and glass containers with colorful lids. A three-quarter view so that the door, filled with condiments and that one expensive almond milk, are visible.]**
Caption: Real life is not always like Instagram and sometimes things get messy. Our fridge is a disaster and I can hear STORE calling my name, but I just wanted to show you guys that you don’t have to be perfect when it comes to food. You just do the best you can, and your body will love you. And you should love your body too! And fuel it with all the deliciousness from STORE! Happy Sunday.
***
Synthetic personalities, virtual celebrities and AI’s larger than life are a staple of science fiction films and novels. There are William Gibson’s Idoru and Neuromancer, the new Blade Runner sequel, that one movie where Joaquin Phoenix sports a questionable moustache, Gorillaz, Skynet and HAL 9000. Countless articles have been written and countless podcast episodes recorded about what it might mean for an entity that is born rather than made to attain consciousness or a sense of self and how much, or how little, we ought to fear that possibility. Having not made it past Siri telling dinosaur jokes (seriously, ask her), all of this registers simply as speculation. Although the more philosophical question of why we are so attracted to discussions of anything nearing artificial intelligence is interesting, most of us are not losing sleep over any AI related dangers.
Simultaneously, we transfer more and more of our personality online, chop it up into images (but only the ones with good light), short captions (but only really witty or profound ones), shared articles and the occasional few lines of text (that better be heartfelt or funny). Synthesis is the opposite of analysis, it is the act of taking a bunch of parts and putting them together into a coherent whole. We analyze ourselves down to the smallest bits (bytes), pick the ones that we like, then synthesize them into a whole new person that can smile, or frown, at whoever will be looking at it on a finger-print laden screen.
***
[A photograph of a fit, thin person holding a cookie in one hand and an ice cream cone, filled with an immaculate soft-serve swirl, in another. The soft-serve is light green, the cookie rather large. They are smiling widely, winking at the camera. Bright light behind them flatters their smooth and straight hair.]
Caption: It can’t be all green juice all the time, right? I mean, balance, haha. These guilt-free, refined-sugar free treats are all I can think of on a warm day like this. Can you believe I used to be scared of carbs and fat? It is crazy how much happier I am now that I can double-fist dessert without worrying about what goes into my body. These are so easy, all you need is a BLENDER, and some bananas and nuts. And they are so, so good. Do yourself and favor and make a double batch, these are basically good for you anyway. Link to the recipe in my bio.
*** I have always been a big believer in having a persona, whether it be in a virtual or a more tangible space; of being your own logo, a signifier of what you are about. It is hard for others to intuit your inner monologue and more often than not speaking up to explain yourself is uncomfortable and unwelcome. We perceive people that talk about themselves too much as needy or conceited, but we appreciate aesthetics and being able to pin labels onto our friends. This is a system that can be exploited.
We all engage in such exploitation from time to time. We have a special pair of shoes for weddings and formal receptions despite spending decades alternating between two types of sneakers. We put aside outfits to debut at a particularly nice date despite a partner having seen us early in the morning and late at night, out of make-up and in t-shirts from high school, with uncombed hair. We wear something uncomfortable to go to a bar with new friends and spend the whole night making sure the moving parts are staying in place despite knowing that no one is actually paying that much attention. People are multi-faceted, a superposition of possible personalities, and we pick and choose which one to highlight in each particular instance. It’s not so much about lying and pretending as much as it is about control. If we can’t be fully in control of ourselves, at least we can be in control of what we present to others, to minimize mismatch with who we think we are and maximize the confidence we need. And if we are given a chance to build who we want to be, the hope is that this can become a roadmap to one day fully being that person(a).
***
[A photograph of a person wearing matching high waisted leggings and a tight cropped top, bent over so that their torso is almost parallel to the ground. One of their legs is straight and one bent at the knee and pulled back into Dancer pose. They are standing on a dark teal mat. The shot shows a branded water bottle on the wooden floor next to the mat. A sliver of a dog’s muzzle and front paws is visible at the other edge of the photo.]
Caption: Yoga was never my favorite but once I truly tried it I got so much more in touch with myself. I start every day on the mat now, just flowing to music and listening to my body. It is amazing how much more grounded and spiritual it has made me feel. A warm ray of light, a turmeric latte and a good flow in some really cozy leggings by BRAND are all I need for a productive morning. Do you have a morning routine? (Use code NAME for 10% off on your own BRAND leggings and top – I freaking adore these).
***
In the wake of recent scandals among the social media giants and all of the belated concerns for our privacy that followed, in conversations ranging from coffee shops to the senate floor, multiple people have pointed out that if a service is free it is because you, the user, are truly the product that it is after. It is not so much that social media services get paid to show us ads as much as they get paid to sell information about us to those who want to show us those ads. This is not the first time in history that individuals have been converted to data points and, in the past, we have even benefited from this when various researchers, be it medical or in other sciences, were able to do the same. It is not so much the numbers, the data or the statistics that render this current crisis worrisome, it is not the cold objectification but rather the commodification of who we are, of treating us as a product-consumer hybrid and not much more.
***
[A group of women stands by a colorful mural holding plastic bottles of juice. One is wearing sunglasses, one a baseball cap and one has a rolled-up yoga mat slung over her shoulder. They are laughing. Most are in dark leggings and sports sneakers. One has her hair up in a top-knot and one is wearing shorts, showing a small ankle tattoo.]
Caption: Real talk time. I used to be so shy and anxious and could never get out of my shell. I just hid at home and doubted my body and my mind and would never dream of reaching out to any of the women around me that seemed so cool and put together. But through hard work and a lot of soul-searching I have been able to break that shell and now I am surrounded by all these awesome people and I have become a true shiny pearl! I will always be grateful for this platform that has let me share so much of my passion and connected me with so many inspiring creatives! I would never have this amazing girl gang were it not for orangey pictures of my dinner years ago, haha. So happy to be spending the day with these cuties, chasing a bomb workout at STUDIO with plenty of DRINK and, most importantly, sunshine and belly laughs that make our abs hurt.
***
The problem with the way in which social media networks gather our preferences, likes and dislikes and package them into an easily digestible product for advertisers and, as we are learning, more sinister actors is that it does not stop even if one takes a more microscopic view of their users. Even without being turned into data, we are invited and incentivized to turn our carefully crafted personas into something that is easily recognizable and easily commodified. Instead of the freedom that curating our representation online seems to have promised when this empty virtual space was new, we are faced with an industry that makes it viable to turn a social media presence into a (lucrative) business if we just adopt a narrative that is sufficiently appealing upon a quick scroll, and easy to fold sponsored content into. In efforts to gather a following, to attain validation from strangers, we mimic this machine and morph who we say we are in ways that betray a pattern shaped by marketing. It is not just about being worried about what others think of our profiles – it can’t be when those that are most popular, and therefore the easiest and most logical to look up to, shape their expressions around promoting and selling. In supporting social media influencers, big companies have over time allowed particular stock types and personalities to emerge and the rest now only have to emulate those in order to achieve some notion of success. To make your voice heard, to connect and reach many – as so many networks claim is their purpose – one is edged closer and closer to adapting a stock character, to exhibiting moments of vulnerability manufactured to be safe, to sharing good moments that are increasingly branded, to adopting a behavior synthesized from a corporate script rather than following self-reflection. In a twist more dystopian than many of our favorite movies, as users we have adapted behaviors that a pattern recognition based AI, a neural network perhaps, could easily generate given enough time.
Sometime last summer my boyfriend jokingly pointed out that I sounded much more chipper writing about food an Instagram than I do talking about it in real life. He did not think my enthusiasm was fake, just different, not quite what he was getting sharing a meal with me in my exactly-two-people-sized kitchen. I picked up a lot of followers since then.
* The holographic principle is an idea stemming from studies of string theory and quantum gravity in the late 1990s. Also known as the AdS/CFT correspondence made famous by Juan Maldacena, it suggests that certain quantum field theories can be viewed as the ‘edges’ of larger, gravitational theories. In other words, the holographic principle hinges on the notion of extra dimensions that are not necessarily always obvious if one happens to be only considering the edge (think of walking on the face of a cube and thinking you are on a flat surface because you cannot see the parts of the cube below you) which is lower in dimension. Holography makes use of the idea of projecting from an analytically more manageable gravitational theory on higher dimensions to a much harder to analyze conformal field theory in the lower dimensions. While the mathematical structure giving rise to the AdS/CFT correspondence is compelling and the methods developed within its field of study have proven extremely useful, there is, as of now, no conclusive experimental (or even fully-fleshed-out theoretical) evidence that it holds in more than a few particular cases.
** I realize that some of these vignettes might come off as a mean-spirited mockery but I really do mean them as an illustration of the phenomenon I am trying to parse in the text rather than any sort of an ad hominem attack or judgement on individuals on social media. Ultimately, scrolling through my own Instagram feed you can see me engaging in similar speech so if these are a mockery they are definitely self-mockery as well.
***
ABOUT THIS WEEK
LEARNING: Not unexpectedly, I spent a portion of the past week dealing with referee reports for one of my papers and preparing a response letter together with collaborators. Reading anonymous critiques of your work then dissecting it further based on those is nowhere near fun but peer review is an integral part of how we keep research worthwhile and honest, so I do not want to complain about it too much. When I was not busy reading and re-reading offending paragraphs and proposed edits, I was likely working on the same quasicrystal problem that has been haunting me for a while now. At this point, getting to the bottom of it is very high on my list of summer priorities, although there are a few other questions I would like to answer before then. Have you ever wondered what would happen to an ultracold quantum superfluid bubble in a gravitational field? I worked that out a few years ago and this week tried to follow it up with a quick calculation to show whether gravity can be ‘cancelled out’ by cleverly using a laser beam. Oddly enough, it seems like for some bubbles maybe this is somewhat plausible which only furthers my admiration for ultracold atoms experimentalists and their ingenuity.
On the teaching side of things, the physics/art class is winding down while the students prepare for their final performances and exhibition, so we spent some of the latest class session simply watching Carl Sagan videos and discussing science communication and how to best conduct and represent it. It was a good discussion, touching on more than one cartoon that excited students when it came to depicting science, and Sagan’s work as a communicator definitely still really holds up.
In my teaching class we discussed formulating teaching philosophies. This is something I have been asked to write about in the past, as a part of a career seminar, and although I generally feel rather strongly about teaching I have not been able to formulate a particularly compelling document of this sort. It is somewhat difficult to imagine the sort of teacher I would want to be given complete free reign since so many of the teaching opportunities graduate students are offered follow something of a cookbook approach – you simply follow the given steps. I partly wonder how realistic it is to even consider the possibility of me teaching truly ‘from scratch’ in the next couple of years and whether that boils down my philosophy simply to ‘be very patient with students’. However, this course, as frustrating as it has often been, has definitely given me a lot to think about when it comes teaching (and thinking about teaching) so writing this statement might, if nothing else, be a good incentive to organize those thoughts.
LISTENING: In thinking about how representing ourselves online in one way or another changes us outside of virtual space, I was reminded of this recent episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the Proteus effect. This is an effect that refers to the way in which the human psyche responds to being represented by an avatar, for instance in a video game. This episode of Flash Forward takes a similar idea further and imagines a future in which all celebrities are represented by digital avatars rather than their own physical likeness. Another Stuff to Blow Your Mind classic that might be relevant here is this episode delving into whether social media is driving us insane. Finally, to contemplate how connecting online is different from face-to-face interactions, this Note to Self story about a service called ‘invisible girlfriend’ and the host’s exceedingly good texting relationship with her husband provides some interesting material.
On the music front, this past week I have been listening to either the new Sleep record or the new Panopticon release. I have unsuccessfully tried to get the local record store to obtain vinyl copies of both which hopefully speaks to how much I like them. Sleep is reliable; they provide a sludgy, heavy variety of metal that drags on and patiently reverberates in your ears. It can be slightly mesmerizing at times. They are not shy about various substances that inspire their music (this record was very un-subtly released on 4/20) but even as someone who has always been terrified of anything that exceeds roughly three drinks, I have found the listening experience to be quite excellent, no matter how green their muse might be. The Panopticon record is quite different, less sludgy and more folky, with a fair amount of black metal thrown in for good measure. I’ve always enjoyed the way they marry the more harsh sounds with what sounds more like a celebration of nature (and nothing is more black metal than nature devouring us) and this record takes that approach to the next level as its part II is almost all acoustic instruments and clean signing, occasionally tinged with blue collar politics. I have mostly stuck to part I, the one with more noise and yelling, but the whole thing (apparently released as a set of four vinyls that sold out immediately) is really impressive and, in a way, beautiful.
(And in case you missed it Kendrick Lamar, who I wrote about listening to in my last letter, won a Pulitzer prize for music this past week. He’s the first rapper ever to do so.)
WATCHING/READING: My list of things to catch-up on or even just try and start is getting longer and longer but my schedule seems to be so packed with end of semester activities and guilt-driven research frenzy that I have made zero progress on both reading Authority and watching Dark in the last few weeks. It’s a shame because I had really enjoyed both. Hopefully I can kick up my time management skills a notch in this week and carve out time to engage with them again.
EATING: Sometime last week I impulse bought a cookbook by Gena Hamshaw of the Full Helping blog and when it showed up in my mailbox decided to try making something I usually would not think about (unlike many curries and stews in the book). As a consequence, I spent most of the week eating a really good kale, tempeh and lentil salad. When I was not eating that (and Gena’s preparation of the ‘bacon’ seasoned tempeh is mildly addictive), I also very much enjoyed some sweet potato saag aloo from this recipe and the sambal potatoes I had made with leftover coconut milk from the saag*. My biggest culinary success of the past week, however, are the muffins I am sharing below. They are crumbly and fluffy and much closer to a bakery creation or a cupcake than any of the banana-based muffins I usually have in rotation. It helps that they basically taste like a really good lemon candy. I am beyond amazed by how good they turned out given that I based them on a blueberry muffin recipe but did not have any blueberries (and it was midnight when the need to bake got hold of me). If you add the super simple, easily improvised, glaze they are definitely a springtime appropriate indulgence, regardless of their origin story.
For six muffins you will need:
1/2 cup of plant based milk (I used cashew but coconut or almond would work as well)
1/2 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 and 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
5 tablespoons granulated sugar
3 tablespoons coconut oil, melted (or canola, or possibly even olive oil)
Zest of 1 lemon
Preheat the oven to 375F and line a small muffin tin (6 slots) with baking cups
In a small bowl or a cup combine the milk and the apple cider vinegar. Mix and let sit. This effectively makes a buttermilk substitute
In a separate bowl mix the flour, baking powder and salt
In a larger bowl mix the sugar and coconut oil, then add in the lemon zest (I simply grated my lemon over the bowl then mixed thoroughly)
Add the milk and vinegar mixture and stir to combine then fold in the dry ingredients. Do not overmix – the batter should be fairly wet and small clumps are fine.
Evenly divide the batter among the six muffin tins and bake for about 25 minutes, until the muffins have developed nice domes and turned a golden color. To test doneness push on a top and see whether it springs back or pierce the muffin with a fork or a chopstick and make sure it comes out clean.
Let the muffins cool in the pan for ten to fifteen minutes, then transfer to a cooling rack and spoon glaze over them (if using)
Optional: to make the glaze, mix (a whisk is super useful here) freshly squeezed juice of a quarter to a half of lemon with powdered sugar (sifted if clumpy) until you reach a desired consistency. To make it richer I added about a tablespoon of fully fat coconut milk but (as I learned from a friend recently) just mixing lemon juice and sugar is great as well.
Tips: If you have blueberries or raspberries, fresh or frozen, definitely fold in about at the end of step five. Toss them with a bit flour beforehand to prevent them from sinking to the bottom of the muffins.
I have not tired this with any other citrus but from similar experiments in the past I suspect that a blood orange or a red grapefruit would be an interesting substitute for lemons here. Both of those would also pair better with a mildly grassy olive oil in place of coconut.
To turn these into cupcakes, opt for a more stiff frosting rather than a glaze, by beating powdered sugar, lemon juice and vegan butter (or your butter of choice) until you achieve a consistency that can be piped or spread into a desired shape. Top with fresh berries or candied lemon peel. (Muffins-turned-cupcakes in this way will keep less long at room temperature.)
* This is a meal prep/meal planning hack right here: buy coconut milk (full fat or light but from a can) to make the saag aloo then use whatever is left for the potatoes and the muffin glaze. You can eat the saag four time as a side, paired with rice and protein of some sort ( I made this super simple dal) and the full serving of the potatoes should last for roughly as many meals as well. Cook a good pot of chickpeas (or buy them canned and simply thoroughly rinse them before eating), invest in some frozen broccoli or spinach or kale that you can quickly saute with garlic, olive oil and lemon juice, some veggies that can be eaten raw such as cherry tomatoes or cucumbers, and you have now basically prepared a whole week's worth of dinners. (Pairings: saag aloo with rice, chickpeas, cucumber slices and broccoli, sambal potatoes with kale, chickpeas and cherry tomatoes, sambal potatoes with broccoli, tomatoes and chickpeas...)