Disclaimer: For the sake of posting more frequently, this post was written in a spurt of energy and barely proofread, if at all. There will certainly be typos, and definitely, a lack of clarity around some of the thoughts shared. Feel free to comment if you have questions about anything particular and I’ll do my best to respond. I may also make edits to this post if and when it makes sense. Thanks for understanding!
So just imagine for a second that to a culture, truth means the most agreed-upon interpretation of reality (democracy?). You can investigate how culture can more consistently resolve to a truth or that which more accurately represents objective reality. You can also investigate what to do about a culture that is going to be extremely high variance along the truth dimension. Today’s popular narratives are all about getting everyone to believe your specific brand of truth though, via various censorship mechanisms. But the reality is that someone will always have a method that will allow them to go around whatever artificial restrictions you set up. And as always, the majority are way behind the curve on this reality.
What seems extremely likely is that in the short term, the system is going to be overrun with content from an exponentially larger number of “content creators,” both humans and bots, and this will overwhelm all information-consuming agents inside the system. The main problem with this is that people don’t actually know what to believe, they use many antiquated shortcuts, but those aren’t as effective at our current level of information flow, which is about to look tiny in comparison to the tsunami building.
Imagine a video of the president of the United States saying whatever you want. One that looks as real as the news coverage we all see clips of frequently enough. Now imagine there is effectively an infinite number of these videos generated daily, some authentically but most artificially, while different websites layer on top of all of this content what various “fact-checking” protocols say regarding the authenticity of the clip. Imagine those fact-checkers swimming through the same ocean of content trying to figure out what is going on just like you and me. It’s turtles all the way down, as fact-checkers will rely on resources they trust which rely on resources they trust etc. This is a scaled-up version of the news media, trusting their sources, and corrupting as a result. It’s the same as it’s always been, but with real saturation. This is a Post Truth world.
Claims of being post-truth have been made before, and what the claims are always pointing to is that some group with a loud enough voice believes they have evidence that the truth no longer matters to the system. In our case, we are deploying the technologies that allow for this to happen at the social layer of the global culture at scale, suddenly, and effectively all at once.
The censorship panic of recent years has been an immune system response by the existing stakeholders. A warning from those who benefit from the existing infrastructure that benefits from the collective’s attention, those with equity in the upsides of their status and therefore have the incentivizes to fight against the overthrow of the old world. The news stations, the politicians, Hollywood, anyone else who benefits, be it financial or in obfuscated forms of power, from the existing information hierarchy that effectively platforms their claims of truth. “How will they watch us if 1 million Oscar-winning films are published every single day by an AI.” “Why will they believe what we want them to believe about reality if 1 million contrasting narratives emerge every day?” They won’t. And as we know, the winners write the history books. The old lessons that we are all learning anew, people will believe whatever information wins the battle for their attention, which is heavily dependent on all kinds of variables, “truth” typically not being one of them. We already see this everywhere, and it’s only really scaled up at the text / meme level. Video, image, and audio are all about to drop, so seriously, hold on tight.
In this sea of noise, taking a poll of what people believe happened is more important than what actually happened. If the majority suddenly decides Jesus has come back to fulfill the prophecy, it may as well be true at some level of scale as measured by collective power. Remember, what actually happened requires lots of work that is going to get harder and harder to do as content continues to scale. If X happened but 60% believe in Y, acting as if Y happened is the easiest to discover for most, and the smartest at the tribe level too. There are both financial and status-based incentives behind what you choose to believe, and you can evaluate those incentives rather quickly compared to digging into what actually happened, especially when “what actually happened” will more often than not leave you ostracized.
Our current system relies on a degree of consensus for stability. If the majority always believes the narrative that best defends their representation of reality, something we can expect to emerge because one of the core functions of ideologies is to build up narratives that protect their core from attacks or arguments that might sway the orthodox, conflicts over truth claims are effectively omnipresent. It’s a globally event diversifying and fragmenting all existing truth structures. The tree of knowledge always wishes to branch further. But it’s also interesting because the more diversified, the more decentralized, the less collective power in a majority view, the less power the majority has. If there is some sort of multi-faceted epistemological stalemate due to a lack of shared belief, then is power also diluted to a similar degree? Looking forward to seeing what happens next.