Photos and Text by Dane Manary

Realities nest upon realities as 2020 persists and moral compasses spin. Election Day in Washington D.C. was like a paradoxical quantum physics experiment. As in a quantum simulation, people found it impossible to tell whether there was an objective “base reality” or a watered down superposition. The black hole that is the year 2020 continued to warp as the election continued to drag on.

Washington D.C. feels like a movie set, a land of crop circles, folklore, and fiction. The media has to follow the performance and selectively dramatize events in order to uphold a certain reality that restricts people, and some marginalized people are restricted much more than others. On the face of the scene, 90% of Election Day attendees clamored to record and upload their sightings.

Facts become irrelevant as we all participate in our own personal 24/7 computer games, mold our online presences, and attempt to know everything instantly, and all at once. Mathematical modeling has exceeded our imaginations and yet somehow, natural systems become more and more distant. If defining consciousness is one of the most profound, difficult, and disputed problems in both historical and contemporary philosophy, and yet computers seem to be gaining it at an accelerating rate, then isn’t there really a 50/50 chance that we are in fact in a simulation? Should I even be googling this question at 2am?

Some want to reboot reality, others want to pause, rewind, etc. However perceived, the disillusionment and trumpery that we’ve been forced into cannot hold up. The makeup smears, and the reruns become tiring. For much of this year, we’ve been horror-struck by how people can seemingly live in their own alternate realities, isolated and withdrawn, without any coherent understanding of how to unite our communities.

That middle of the night research on whether we are living in a simulation tends to start with the question of metaphysical solipsism: am I the only person who exists? The answer is probably not. Everyone appears to experience a common reality, identify patterns, colors, objects, etc. Therefore, whether we entertain the theory of a hypothetical or perceived simulation or not, we are in it together. The next step should endeavor to free us from restrictive models set forth by the government, media, and all powerful data systems; to finally see it for what it really is, together.