the booming business of quantum bullshit
Countless influencers claim they use science to make people's lives better, longer, and healthier, for a fee, of course. What they're actually doing is selling magic.
Koya Webb is a typical internet health influencer who actually describes herself in her official bio as a “conscious global citizen and heart-centered thought leader.” Which, yes, sure are words that I’m told are supposed to have some sort of meaning. What, I can’t figure out over the deafening crunch of granola in the background. Webb also posts informative charts to show you what food is good for which one of your organs based on the cutting edge principle of… uhh… the food resembling the organ?
“Look here! The cross section of a carrot looks like an eyeball so you know it’s good for your eyes! Mushrooms look like ears so they’re good for hearing! Does your brain need a boost? Walnuts look like brains for a reason! And eggplant… Well… Let me tell you about eggplant…”
Now, to be fair, there was a time in my life where I had the same question after looking at the old Soviet medical encyclopedias in my bedroom-library combo. At said time, I was seven years old or so, and asked my parents about it. They thought it was cute, then promptly explained to me why this is not how that works. Webb’s staff were not big fans of my, admittedly, not very diplomatic attempt to relay this story, and so they promptly blocked me, but I took a handy screenshot for you to see for yourself.
You won’t find this sort of premium information on her website, replete with pictures of her in a style I could only describe as New Age cult leader. You’ll have to follow her on social media. And just imagine how many more useful infographics she has if you decide to pay for her motivation, tips, and advice for $20 per month, or coaching at $797 to $2,797 per course. Impressed? Have her speak at your event for… holy shit… a $20,000 to $30,000 fee?
Note to self, I am in the wrong business. Why bother with computers and code when there are tens of thousands of dollars to be made spewing utter nonsense peppered with enough buzzwords? Personally, I have a whole thing about not wanting to lie to strangers for profit, and not pretending to be an expert in things I know I’m not. But some people? They don’t have similar holdups, which is why coaches and gurus are all over social media, busy peddling mountains of bullshit for a fee.
Selling health, fitness, and meditation advice infused with a huge dose of nonsense which sounds like science but couldn’t be further from it, are par for the course on social media. And if you go further down that rabbit hole, you will quickly encounter the most frequent and successful brand of New Age scam: quantum woo.
how new age woo fell in love with “quantum”
You’ve no doubt heard about The Secret and The Law of Attraction. If not, you’re a very lucky soul and I want to give you a very gentle hug — and I’m not a hugger by nature, so you know how serious this is — then pat you on the head and urge you to stop reading immediately to protect your sanity. The world is more than dark enough as it is, so every innocent soul is precious.
If you didn’t heed my advice above, or already knew what I was talking about, you are well aware that if you want something badly enough, think about it obsessively, and have a “vision board” where you post your daily inspo, you can “manifest it” into your life because something something quantum. As the eminent Professor Farnsworth of Futurama succinctly summarized, as Deepak Chopra tells us, anything can happen at any time, for any reason. Because quantum, you see.
“Wait, hold on a minute Greg, that’s not how quantum physics work at all! If that was true, then there’d be no such thing as the universe, everything would just explode for no reason at random all the time, wouldn’t it? And who would claim that reality isn’t real but just a figment of our imagination?”
Amazingly, a lot of New Age influencers who like the notion that there’s no such thing as an objective reality, or object permanence for that matter, and the cosmos works through “vibrations” and “intentions” that you can master to bend reality to your whim as expressed in your vision boards and manifesting rituals. There’s even a canonical movie outlining the movement’s obsession with their profound misunderstanding of quantum fundamentals, What The Bleep Do We Know. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here it is summarized in a two minute TikTok.
That mind-boggling — yes, in a terrible, terrible way — video was made by a woman named Kelsey Yeager, who argues that because a Nobel Prize was given to scientists who proved that quantum entanglement exists, we can confidently say that reality is not real and just a set of possibilities we manipulate.
How? Did you not hear the word quantum? Or missed the Nobel Prize part? Scientists figured it out. Just chill and pay her the $11 a month to learn how to manifest your way into being wealthy dammit.
Before you do though, there’s a bit of a problem I feel compelled to point out for the sake of your sanity and wallet…
why you can’t just surf universes on demand
Imagine for just a moment that she’s right and reality doesn’t exist because quantum, so you basically create your own reality every time you blink. Then what exactly would you be? Your mind is made of atoms held together by electromagnetic bonds. If those bonds don’t really exist or can simply vanish, doesn’t that imply that you can exist one moment and vanish the next, possibly forever? You’d have to exist outside of time and space as we know it to survive these reality-shattering blips.
And what says that in whatever universe of possibilities you end up, a bunch of those won’t be horrific? I don’t mean your favorite cafe doesn’t have hazelnut creamer for your latte, or you got a ticket for double parking in a disabled zone. I mean, the kind of nightmare that would make Pinhead vomit in fear and disgust, the kind of nightmare portrayed in the Warp of Warhammer 40K, where traveling between stars faster than light involves a literal trip through Hell.
Isn’t it weird how all these New Age quantum manifesting gurus never mention this is a possibility despite that fact that if what they say is true, it would make no sense for the universe to only offer us realities that max out at a utopian dream on the positive scale and living paycheck to paycheck on the negative one? Not to mention that for you to be able to create or pop out of universes, you’d need to be a being that exists in at least five dimensions outside infinity. You know, a god. Or, if that sounds like way too much responsibility for you, one of the Sliders.
But this is effectively what the promise of quantum manifestation is telling you; you are a god, that reality can be bent to your whim, and if you pay these gurus — many of whom just so weirdly happen to be fit, preppy white women with some background in sales and marketing, and a bubbly delivery — they’ll teach you how to do it. And you have to admit, it’s very nice of them to choose to stay in a universe with us muggles, err… I mean non-manifesting yokels, instead of staying in their manifested ultra-luxe penthouses with infinity pools of champagne and sevruga caviar on tap.
In reality, quantum mechanics applies to a zoo of subatomic particles with names like muons, tau, bosons, and leptons, which, like electrons, can behave both like waves and like particles. What the Nobel Prize winning research found is that we can’t just measure both behaviors simultaneously because they’re mathematically exclusive, so if we want to understand how a system of bound subatomic particles works over time, we have to calculate the probability of how they’ll behave, then take a snapshot for an instant in time between which we’re stuck with probabilities.
Wait, doesn’t mean is that the particles could be anywhere and don’t “collapse” until we see them as we tend to hear? No, they’re there somewhere and stuff will happen whether or not we’re there to observe it. We just can’t get a full picture so we use a whole bunch of very fancy terms to highlight the limits of our tools and models. The waveform collapse, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and wave packets just mean different aspects of the problem outlined above. Or, in Gen Z, why the math won’t be mathing sometimes.
the many quantum predators of the web
We still don’t know how quantum entanglement works, just that under extreme or very elaborate conditions, subatomic particles or atoms cooled to basically absolute zero will form bonds that we can manipulate with magnets and a little math so it all sort of works out even if the change would’ve had to happen faster than the speed of light. It remains an area of study, as scientists say when they mean “beats me, shit’s weird.”
What we do know, however, is when you get to something the size of viruses, one or all of the fundamental forces — strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism, and gravity — kick in and prevent the objects from behaving like both particles and waves, or becoming parts of quantum systems. (Some papers claimed otherwise but their quality is highly suspect to put it mildly.) In short, if you’re not an electron or a positron, but a whole ass human, you’re not subject to quantum effects.
Oh, and not so fun side note: Mark Vicente, the guy who created What The Bleep Do We Know, ended up making propaganda and infomercials for the NXIVM cult. Yes, the one with the creepy finance bro looking guy whose signature move was coercing the followers he found attractive into a stable of sex slaves who he also branded as if they were cattle. Weird how Mark didn’t manifest a different reality for himself, huh?
Now, look, I get it. We’ve spent the last decade or so going through “unprecedented times” and when we close our eyes, we dream of times that are so precedented, we may as well roll over and go back to sleep. Many of us are not as healthy as we want to be. Many of us are struggling to get by. Many of us are caught on a hamster wheel of life due to bad luck and systemic, long-festering problems. We desperately want an easy way out, a cheat code to this universe, a way of getting out of our Hell, the one that is other people.
People like Webb, or Yeager, or a million other gurus who infest our timelines like the Tech Age’s equivalent of the plague, are not your friends, or allies, or mentors. They’re predators, pure and simple. Sure, they may not be Nigerian princes suddenly looking for random strangers to help their move their $630 quadrillion fortune, and you might be handing over your credit card willingly, but they’re still lying and scamming you out of your hard earned money. The only question is whether they’re lying to themselves as well, but that’s a moot point that doesn’t make what they do any better.
The sad truth is that if you want to see real changes in today’s objectively frustrating, rage-inducing existence where simpletons and clowns with 19th century ideas work within 18th century legal frameworks to govern 21st century countries focused on the problems of the 22nd century, you need to manifest yourself a healthy, heavy dose of skepticism, a solid bullshit detector, maybe a union membership card, then go out to demand change at the polls, in your community, and with your spending habits.
Your perfect dream universe isn’t out there, waiting for you to tap your heels together and wish it into existence. You have to go out there and build it.