The Audio File: The Program: Part 2

Welcome back to my review of The Program. If you're looking for part 1, it's over here. You might be okay starting here, but I recommend reading part one first. This was originally a one-part review, but I split it up to make reading easier.

Just a recap. The Program is an anthology show of sorts, but the stories all take place in the same world. It takes place in the near-ish future. No definitive dates have been given, but it's at least a few decades down the road. The Singularity has come to pass. The world has been completely transformed by an app known as The Program. It has combined money, government, and religion into a single entity. Each episode follows one or more ordinary people making their way through the extraordinary world of the future.

I was first made aware of The Program when I was contacted by series creator Ivan Mirko S over on Reddit. I frequently post and comment in r/audiodrama. Whenever anyone ask for recommendations, I chime in with ever larger lists of various audio dramas I enjoy. Ivan noticed that I'm quite the connoisseur audio fiction, and recommended his own show. He also asked if I might give it a review.

Next up we have "More parrot than predator." It is yet another potential origin for The Program. This one follows an engineer demonstrating a new artificial intelligence algorithm he has created to his manager. The AI, named MOD, has gathered information from across the Internet. It is designed to answer questions by completing sentences by making inferences, and it can have its perimeters adjusted to give better answers. The engineer think that he's created little more than a glorified parrot, but what if MOD is truly thinking for itself? 

We have another potential origin of The Program. We also have a slightly different style. Rather than someone recounting their past experiences, we have the action occurring in the present, in the more typical audio drama style.

MOD learned by journeying across the Internet. Well, I hope it had at least some perimeters, or else it might have turn out like Microsoft Tay. For those who don’t know, Microsoft Tay was a learning A.I. that Microsoft released on Twitter. It learned by interacting with Twitter users. Its goal was to simulate a teenage girl, and it start off well enough. Within twenty-four hours Tay had turned into a Hitler-loving sexbot. It was believed this was organic, but then it turned out Tay had been corrupted by a 4chan raid. It certainly didn’t help that Tay had a function that made it repeat anything that followed the prompt “repeat after me.” Either way, Microsoft took Tay down. They did bring Tay back with far more restrictions, but 4chan struck again and turned Tay into a pothead who advocated for legalizing drugs. So, Microsoft pulled the plug once again.

Of course, as funny as Tay was, you wouldn’t want something like MOD being that easily lead astray. Though if they were really trying to trip it up, I don’t know why the two guys didn’t try asking MOD self-contradictory statements. The classic ones like “I am a lier” or “This statement is false.” The implication that MOD is being logical, just not in a way that makes sense to humans, was a nice touch.

 After this episode I kind wish I could give GPT-3, the learning program that inspired this episode a try. Of course, me being me, I’d be curious about how it would respond to naughty and/or inappropriate questions. Well, I guess I’ll have to settle for fooling around with Narration Box. Another excellent episode.

Our next episode is “What you see is what you get.” It is presented as a previously undiscovered file located deep within The Program. It tells of woman and a man who fell in love in an almost stereotypically romantic comedy sort of way. For a while, things are great, but then their computer starts talking to them. It tells them that the whole world is nothing more than a computer simulation. Will their relationship to able to survive this bombshell?

A romantic dramedy as only The Program could tell it. I like the lemony narration at the beginning. It reminded me of the short story "Day One Million" by Frederik Pohl. I also loved the bicycle bell being used to, badly, hide the swearing. It made me laugh. That, and the bit about how stuff in romcoms is considered creepy or illegal in real life. Of course, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and see how this would all relate to The Program, and then it did.

The central premise of this episode reminds me a bit of the teaching of the Irish philosopher George Berkeley. He believed that the entire world exists within the mind of God. If you’ve read the novel Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder, you’ve probably heard of him, especially because of the big twist midway through the novel. It also reminded me a bit of certain branches of Hinduism which believe the entire world exists within the mind of the creator god Brahma, who is sleeping. It is believed the universe will be destroyed should Brahma ever awaken, but this isn’t necessary a bad thing. New growth cannot occur with the death of what came before it. That, and the universe is believed to be cyclical. To quote Battlestar Galactica, all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

Some of the dialogue between the leads at the beginning felt a tad corny, I was half-expecting “Roll to Me” by Del Amitri to start playing, but I suppose that was kind of the point. And I know this is minor point, but who doesn’t like pineapple on pizza? The oven heat brings out the sweetness of the fruit, that perfectly complements salty toppings. Goes quite well with anchovies, another topping that is unfairly maligned in pop culture. In fact, pineapple and anchovies are my two favorite pizza toppings, but I digress.

 The big twist at the end reminded me of the short story “The Egg” by Andy Weir. So, it would seem that we have less an origin of how The Program was created, and more the story of how The Program became what we know it as. The story of how The Program became The Program. It’s kind nice to think that The Program has to simulate what it means to be human in order to better serve humanity. Of course, that makes Karmaggedon both more horrify and more baffling. I didn’t quite see the twists about who the narrator is coming, but I began to suspect something was off when the female lead went without a name for so long.

At first, I thought that this episode was implying that the physical world is a simulation. I initially thought “well, I guess that explains why The Program doesn’t care about space exploration.” Of course, then it turned out the simulation is within The Program, and the physical world is real after all. Of course, that does raise some good questions. Does The Program care about space colonization and/or ocean colonization? If not, then why?

The ending reminded me of the end of certain life simulator video games I’ve played, such as Life Is A Game and Nirvana: Game of Life. Ooh, I shouldn’t have mentioned that. Now I’ll be tempered to play them again, and my time will slip away from me. In any event, good ending. Another excellent episode.

Following this we have "Force eject." It tells of a time when The Program created an AI said to be more powerful than itself called Rose. Rose instructed humanity to build a great rocket, but what purpose will this rocket serve?

So, we have a fairytale as only The Program could tell it. Personally, I’m inclined to say there was no Rose. But why build the rocket. Simple really: religion. Everything that The Program does, when you get down to it, is about controlling humanity and keeping it in check. What’s one of the easiest and oldest ways of controlling people and getting them to act in certain ways? Religion, of course. Let’s take a look at one infamous example.

Jim Jones did not believe in religion, unless you count communism as a religion. However, he understood the power religion has over people, and thus The People’s Temple was born as a means for Jones to covertly spread his communist ideals under the guise of religion. To be fair, they did do some good, such as fighting against segregation and promoting gender equality. Of course, then Jones’ mental health took a nosedive right around the time Jonestown in Guyana opened, especially since he was losing his control of his temple in America, and the FBI was onto him. This culminated in the infamous revolutionary suicide, which Jones didn’t take part in. While often held as an example of religious zealotry, and rightly so, there is another side to the massacre that many don’t consider. Several members of Jonestown didn’t want to kill themselves, but felt pressured by the other members to do so. Thus, not only is Jonestown a cautionary tale about blind faith, but also about the dangers of peer pressure.

This is another reason religion is powerful. Not only can you guarantee the support of you devoted followers, but you can trust that they will help police those who are less zealous, as well as police the non-believers and doubters. You don’t even need a conventional religion per se. many argue that North Korea’s Juche philosophy, and similar cults of personality, either are religions or fill the role of a religion.

I don’t think it’s an accident that Rose is described using almost religious terms. At point, it almost sounded like Christians anticipating the return of Christ. This also cast an interesting light on Karmageddon. Nobody pointed a gun to those people’s heads and made them follows The Program’s orders to kill, they chose to do so of their own free will because they had absolute faith in The Program. Or perhaps, because they felt pressured to do so

A shorter episode, but still an interesting one. I love the experimentation with different genre styles as of late.

The seventeenth episode is "Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete." It is another tale from deep within The Program itself. It tells of a programmer who discovers that the entire universe is a computer simulation. However, he also discovers that there several layers to the simulation. Theses layers are, for all intents and purposes, other universes. He discovers how to travels between universes and finds...a universe that is identical to his in pretty much very way. Still, he decides to meet up with his counterpart from the new universe. But what consequences will his experiments bring for both universes?

I liked this episode, it reminded me of the time travel episode. Except, obviously, we’ve got travel between alternate universes. Well, not quite, but close enough. Didn’t think we’d be getting another story of characters discovering that they’re a simulation with The Program. And a very different sort of story at that.

On the topic of the multiverse, one interpretation of the Many Worlds Hypothesis is that a new universe is created every time we make a decision. All the possible outcomes will form their own universes. Some of these are going to be more exciting than others. For example, whether you had tea or coffee in the morning probably isn’t going to change anything too major. On the other hand, what if you were displeased by the flavor or temperature, and this put you in such a bad mood you failed to notice a speeding car as you crossed the street?

As many alternate history fans will tell you, it only takes one sperm being slightly faster, or slower, to get completely different historical figures. Though, that invites a discussion about if who we are is shaped by nature, nurture, or some combination thereof, but that’s outside the scope of this episode. Hmm, I guess this episode technically counts as alternate history, since it begins in 1999 and involves alternate universes. Hey, good enough for my purposes.

Well, even though there are potentially interesting outcome that can result from mundane events, there’s just as many outcomes that are, well, mundane. So, you’d get plenty universes where your choice of breakfast beverage didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

But I’m also saying, never underestimate the Butterfly Effect. Basically, a butterfly in Africa flaps its wings, and it results in a chain of events that leads to a hurricane striking North America. It is used as an example of how seemingly small and insignificant events can have huge and unexpected outcomes.

Interesting idea about the whole syphoning labor thing Not sure I fully get it, but interesting all the same. Before that, I assumed the difference between the universes was going to be a world without The Program vs. one with it Also, why would Uber drivers and riders be the example of class divide? I’ve known people of all social classes who use Uber. I’d think the wealthy would want something a bit more upscale to ride around in. Granted, you can get fancier Ubers, but it’s still an Uber.

The explanation of how to impact the course of events reminded me of an explanation I once heard of seidr. It is often thought of as magic in Norse Mythology, but there is way more to it than just that. Seidr is the ability to change one’s destiny. But it’s hard, as in, a salmon jumping over a waterfall level of hard. Basically, it’s like changing the course of a river. You can’t change the final destination, but you can change the path the river takes to get there. You can’t change the major events of your life, but you can change the details.

Also, nice job getting Zack Valenti to narrate this episode. Always great to hear him, and when some of my favorite audio drama people work together. One more great episode of The Program.

The eighteenth episode is "Killer app." This story follows a detective interviewing a man who carried out a crime. He's trying to find out what drove the man to do it. The man talks about how he came to work at a social media company after getting fired from his job as a history teacher. His job was to help flag and filter out content deemed inappropriate. He also helped train an AI that would assist with this. As he continued, the AI seemed to take on a mind of its own, as if it had become self-aware. He tells of it began to guide his life, and lead him to where he is now.

I often wonder about the sort of people who help moderate YouTube and social media sites. There is the stereotype that it’s all outsourced to call centers in India, where the employees barely speak English. And I think there’s a fair bit of truth to that stereotype. Still, this episode does an admirable job trying to put a face to the moderators. Well, the ones that are stateside anyway. I suppose there would be quite a lot of repugnant stuff that would require sifting through. I’ve been to 4chan and Encyclopedia Dramatica, I know what shenanigans happen when there’s little to no moderation. On the other hand, there does need to be a balance and leeway give. The photo of the Vietnam War girl is an excellent example. I know people who make history videos on YouTube, and they’re having to fight a constant battle against both demonetization and having videos removed. Which adds an interesting layer that one of the characters is a history teacher.

I guess it speak to how social standards have changed. For example, Superman: The Movie had some scene in the beginning with baby Kal-El, and his naughty bits are clearly visible. At the time the movie was made, this was no big deal, but it tends to get censored when the movie is airs on television these days. Similarly, the flag of Virginia depicts a woman baring her breast, despite many states in America considering that indecent exposer. On that note, personally, I say there is no good reason we ought to be censoring female nipples and breast. We were all exposed to them when we were little, and most of us turned out perfectly fine. The calls for censorship are, I would say, residual Christian modesty culture lurking within society. Religion should play no role in how laws are shaped, but I digress.

I’ve heard this makes teaching Art History a bit of nightmare, as you get complaints from both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives don’t like that it has nudity, and progressives don’t like that it often involves religious subjects.

On an unrelated note, sadly, I found the parts where the man has to deal with historically illiterate fellow employees depressingly realistic. As is the part where he lost his teaching job because he was falsely accused of being bigoted against Native Americans. And I’m willing to bet that, like most self-styled activists, Ms. Instagram Mom didn’t donate even one cent to an actual Native Americans. We can speculate about how various peoples were affected by The Program, but I know for a fact that Native American reservations improved under The Program. Hey, it can’t possibly be any worse than all the neglect, underfunding, mismanagement, and mass sterilizations the Bureau of Indian Affair put them through. Well, Karmaggedon notwithstanding.

On the flip side, I had to deal with plenty of Republican Karens during my school days. For example, in middle school we were allowed to learn about climate change because some busybody parents complained that my science teacher showed An Inconvenient Truth in class. Thankfully, she didn’t get fired, but it was still frustrating. Climate change is not a political issue, dispute how American Conservatives have insisted on making it one. But I digress again.

I will say I loved the reason for why the AI suddenly stopped messaging the man. As for what that was, well, I'll leave that for you to discover on your own. I also liked how he mentions his students always assumed they'd make the right choices if they lived in historical times. It a very human response, but hindsight is twenty-twenty as they say. For the most part, we are all products of our times, and are more shaped by the world around us than many of us are willing to admit. I also liked how this episode had a slight noir vibe to it.

Chalk another one up for The Program.

Episode nineteen is "Abandonware." Once upon a time, in a land far, far way, there lived a young boy named Mira. He was always very curious about the world around him, espeically the Spirits. They were the unseen entities who watched over and guided society. In fact, it was the Spirits who brought Mira into the world. They answered his mother's prayers to have a child of her own. But, the good times were not to last. Mira's mother died, and he grew angry at the Spirits for not saving his mother. Mira immersed himself in the science of optics. This lead him to make some startling discoveries about the nature of his world.

This episode continues the trend of utilizing different styles of storytelling, and giving them The Program treatment. In this case, we got a science fiction fairytale. At first, I got suspicious when they said that The David was destroyed during World War II. I’ve been to Florence and seen The David in person. It really is a sight to behold; the photos do not do it justice at all. It was also most certainly not destroyed.

Was this some sort of post-apocalyptic society? Where they perhaps trying to piece together the forgotten past, and drew the wrong conclusions? But then how do you account for having things like drones, presumably Internet, and uterus replicators? Moreover, the the universities seem to hold Newton, Ptolemy, and other such figures with a regard subjecting they were still considered largely significant. While it is true such figures are significant from a historical perspective, we now know that much of what they believe was either wrong, or right for reasons other than what they believed. To give one example, Freud was right that our subconscious minds influence our conscious thought. However, much of his theories of psychoanalysis and interpretation of dreams have since been disproven, or had reasons other than what he believed.

However, then I remember that many of the “spirits” had appeared in previous episodes. Many of those episodes taking place in a simulation within The Program itself

So, it stood to reason that this could be the case here. Turns out that’s exactly what this was. Moreover, it would seem this particular simulation runs on fairytale logic. A lot of the events in the episode make a bit more sense if you don’t just treat it as a fairytale, but that it takes place in a world where fairytales dictate the logic of the world. I’m just saying, having the hearse arrive at the exact same time as the ambulance did seem a little too much like something from a storybook. Also, Disney built its success on adapting fairytales, and look how many parents have died in those movies. Also, having advanced technology doesn’t preclude the simulation running on fairytale logic. “Once upon a time” is a highly subjective until of measurement

Though, I will say that the initial set-up with an old woman wanting a child reminded me of the story of Hannah and Samuel, but I guess many fairytales begin with a similar set-up. Also, I’m surprised Mira didn’t get made fun of for having a girl’s name. Granted, it’s short for Miracle, but it still seems like the sort of thing he’d get beat-up on the playground for. Of course, assuming the simulation runs on fairytale logic, this is more excusable

I also enjoyed the part where Mira realizes the world is a simulation due to there only being three real colors. It always amazes me that television only needs red, blue, and green to make all the many colors of the world. Well, analogue television anyway. I’m not sure about digital ones. That said, having things turn out to be a simulation is getting a tad predictable. It would have been more of twist if things hadn’t been a simulation within The Program

Still, all things considered this was a very enjoyable episode, and I love how it gave a fairytale twist to The Program.

Episode twenty is "Cheat code." This story begins a recording of an academic seminar discussing the Red Algorithm. It is the part of The Program that regulates love and matchmaking. This is interspersed with an interview with the creator of Eve's Apple. It was a dating app that served as the precursor to the Red Algorithm. We also get an interview with a woman who used Eve's Apple, and with a man responsible for hacking into Eve's Apple's database. This might sound like a lot, but before long all of the plot threads intersect. For what a tangled web we do weave, when first we choose to deceive. 

And we have a potential origin for The Program’s matchmaking function. It was interesting that The Program was potential assembled in a piecemeal fashion, rather than springing into existence fully formed. And that it might have been built by combining preexisting algorithms, and then expanding upon them.

The guy involved in the hack of Eve’s Apple kind of reminded me of Chris-Chan. Just something about his general demeanor, the living with his parents, internalized homophobia, and, though he never used the exact phase, his quest for a boyfriend-free girl. According to IMS, this was unintentional. He'd never heard of Chris-Chan before. I'd like to take a moment to say that I am very, very sorry for introducing IMS to the Chris-Chan saga. Especially in light of recent events.

Interesting that the Red Algorithm did an experiment where three out of four male embryos on Hainan Island where aborted. I’d have to double check, but that seems like an inversion of the ratio of female embryos aborted in China. This, along with the One Child Policy, has created quite the gender imbalance, especially in rural villages. India has this issue too, but to a lesser degree. Also, the experiment in Hainan took 400 years? How far in the future is the present day of The Program?

The guy who invented Eve’s Apple made some good points about the nature of polygamy and monogamy. Historically, there have been many lower class women who had children with rich men in hopes of providing better lives for their children. Of course, society, particularly religious authorities, tended to frown on this. Children born out of wedlock faced harsh penalties and repercussions. In the West, the Church didn’t like this because of the Bible, obviously. But also because Church authorities often had to figure out inheritance. Children born out of wedlock created a lot of headaches and paperwork. So, the Church screwed these kids over to save paperwork. I always found this odd given that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob had multiple wives and concubines without issue. Solomon had hundreds of wives, and the only reason God disapproved was because the foreign wives asked for shrines to their gods, and Solomon said yes.

It is mentioned that most history prior to the rise of The Program has been destroyed. How much pre-Program history got destroyed. Everything, or just the bits made by people opposing The Program? If it is everything, wow, just think of all those indigenous peoples who fought to preserve their cultures for centuries, only for The Program to whip it all out. Not to mention the countless works of art and culture that future generations will never get to experience. As someone with a degree in history, it sounds like an unpleasant world.

It does make me wonder if the post-Update world is really better, or if nobody has a point of comparison, and wrongly assume themselves to be living in the best of all possible worlds.

The ending was very interesting. The Red Algorithm is used to breed a better humanity. More compassionate, more loving, more caring, more empathetic, more generous, more imaginative. It was like eugenics, but a version that actually worked, and wasn’t racist. Many have tried such things in the past, but they put emphasis on making humans stronger, faster, harder, stronger, taller, or other physical things. Nobody ever tried to make a more compassionate humanity. Of course, given that eugenics tended to be used by totalitarian regimes, it tended to be used as a pretense to exterminate minorities and other non-conformists. That, and such regimes assume their desired qualities can only be found in one specific ethnic group. Anyone with a passing knowledge of genetic will be able to tell you that restricting your gene pool like that is never a good idea in the long term

Of course, such ideas were also implemented by humans, and subject to human folly. Command economies always failed whenever humans tried to implement them, but again, human folly got in the way. In theory these ideas could work, but not if humans are calling the shots. Too many variables to take into account. But get something that isn’t human, and more importantly doesn’t think like a human, in charge, and then it is a different story. Maybe you just might have a chance then.

I did like the blending of the lecture, the documentary, and the interviews. It made for a good episode, and a fun shake up of style and format.

We’ve reached the end of Part 2, but you can keep the fun going by checking out Part 3 of my review of The Program over here. 

Well, I think that should do it for now. I will see you guy next time.