What we are seeing now is the end, not of hypocrisy, but of credibility.
The prediction that institutions founded in a limited information environment (and their extant policies specifically) will simply continue in an unlimited information environment by simply changing rhetoric, are exactly that: predictions.
That is to say, if a hypothetical swindler cannot profitably swindle when the veracity of her lies are easily checked. The article proposes that our imaginary trickster need simply start telling the truth to continue prospering.
The flaw in this vision was the naive assumption that all or at least most of this information would be honest and correct. It’s the usual failure of mostly honest people to factor in just how many sociopaths there are and to imagine what those with no ethics (or “end justifies the means” ethics) will do.
Instead we have entered a “fog of war” situation where it’s almost impossible to figure out what’s happening. Add to that the new practices of online cult indoctrination (“pilling”) and you now have tons of bad faith sophistry on top of all that bad faith propaganda. Online popular intellectuals now “hide their power level” in a gamified quest to indoctrinate people.
I’ve been predicting for a while that at some point civilization will be forced to make lying illegal. To knowingly state a falsehood that is not clearly labeled as fiction or satire would be a felony subject to large fines and loss of access to certain media for corporations and/or prison sentences for people.
The reason this has never been done is the thorny problem of determining truth, but at some point we might be forced to either go there or shut off the net. There will be a ton of collateral damage and chilling effects, but I wonder if the choice is between this and death by suffocation in bullshit.
Maybe people will learn to no longer believe partisan information sources, and organisations whose reputation is based solely on the veracity of their content will predominate.
Post truth society is already here. Disinformation has been on the rise the past couple of decades, and the results are clearly visible: conspiracy theories, election misinformation, and divisive politics where people's worldviews vary across their perception of reality.
Photoshopping and lying your way to a narrative is now the norm in the age of social media.
No doubt that AI will accelerate this, but to act like AI is the beginning is just evidence that you aren't paying attention.
I guess you mean to say that we will go back to centralization since nothing decentralized can be trusted, with how easy it will become to fake facts. But that's assuming that the consumer primarily cares about truth. If that was the case, we would not be here to begin with.
This is also my best case scenario, and I do think it's going to play out, but in a different way. Instead of relying on better signals, people are going to just generally disregard all signals. You can already see foreshadowing of what will happen in today's world. As the media has begun playing increasingly fast and loose with the truth, it's not like people just started trusting certain entities more - but rather trust in the entire media system collapsed.
As per a recent article [1], only 25% of Americas do not think the media is deliberately misleading them (50% do, 25% unsure). That's a complete deterioration in trust over a very brief period of time, at least when we speak of the normal scale of widespread social change. And, IMO, this will be a major step forward. Trust is too easily weaponized in a time where there's seemingly been a catastrophic collapse of ethics and morals among both political and business leaders. It's like The Prince is now everybody's bedside book.
By the time I looked at this, the end path had changed, as "Fact" now leads to "Truth" instead of "Information". How long until someone intentionally manipulates the chain?
We don't really have an independent press anymore, and blog-sphere can be trivially gamed by interested and powerful actors. Have we as a civilization ever witnessed such a pervasive disinformation culture?
I forget who said this, possibly a character in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but the idea was that when a population perceives that the social order is unfair (due to bad faith power actors) the general powerless members of society engage in silent acts of social sabotage and everyone becomes an antisocial actor. The parallel here, imo, with the now general awareness of our being subject to intense propaganda and disinformation by nearly all venues, is that lying for your ideological cause is OK. And frankly, when torture is OK, I suppose lying is OK too. Why the hell not.
So. Apparently "fake news" is OK [1] if your camp is doing it. Interestingly enough, this dialectical push-pull on disinformation will result with an information regime designed to 'safeguard us and our national security' against disinformation. Yesterday we laughed when a CNN muppet warned us to not read Wikileaks and leave that to 'authorized media'. Tomorrow, the joke will be on us.
(Btw, people in this community could step up and start looking into what would an unbiased fact checking system and infrastructure would look like. Let's not leave it to the Alphabets and Google to do the fact checking bit for us.)
That's a VF.Hive hit piece on DJT. Not a problem, since its a gossip book anyway, but note it's reference to an NBC news item regarding security clearances for family members, and how it glibly notes in passing that DJT denies it, but "purges" and "house of cards" narrative is more entertaining, so on goes the show.
The political agenda does not undermine the substantial point: American institutions have been shamelessly lying. This isn't new: the US entered Iraq on a lie and the NSA was caught lying to congress during the Snowden leaks. What has changed is that the public is more aware of the cynical manipulation due to the ridiculous treatment of the pandemic, the very real consequences, and the alternative distribution media that are now more common.
I'd love to just list off the lies. But the problem is systemic. The media has established their own echo chamber on Twitter, policy experts are politically captured if not beholden to special interests, and anyone with a sincere interest in the truth must blog under a pseudonym lest they be cancelled for raising inconvenient lines of reasoning.
The working class public is not aware of the precise institutional failures which happened during Covid, or of credible information sources. They see position "A" being pushed one week and then a month later position "not A" being pushed, and the same for B, C, D,... and slowly they start trusting the conspiracy theorists who say that it's all lies, and actually Alpha, Beta, Gamma...
>Seeing will no longer be believing and society will be forced to look at things with a more critical and skeptical eye or with a higher level of diligence.
That's not what will happen. What will happen is that people will consider video which corroborates their biases to be legitimate, and video which contradicts their biases to be fraudulent. Bear in mind that skepticism is already on the rise - the web is rife with it, to the point that any news source whose reporting isn't sufficiently paranoid, cynical or piss-taking is dismissed out of hand as likely propaganda, yet this widespread mistrust in just about everything hasn't resulted in a rise in critical thinking or due diligence, rather the opposite, because it's easy for people to live in self-perpetuating alternate universes with multiple positive feedback loops provided through the web reinforcing their filter bubbles.
>Value should also shift back to more legitimate sources.
It might, if anyone believed that legitimate sources existed anymore outside of 4chan, Reddit and Comedy Central. Unfortunately it seems as if we as a society have decided to abandon the premise that objective truth exists, as the world around us is fed to us more and more as abstractions by untrustworthy arbiters. Deepfakes aren't going to help solve the problem of who can be trusted to "legitimize" truth in a "post-truth" world.
If you think this is pessimistic, the worst is yet to come. The AI/ML genie is out of the bottle and the s/n ratio is only going to get worse.
>Of course, this can’t go on forever. Eventually people abandon those polluted streams. That’s what will happen after the Age of Information crashes.
No, this Age of "Information" (for want of a better word) has changed the meaning of language itself (and hence our thoughts themselves) so that words like "Truth", "Trust", "Information", "Right/Wrong" etc. no longer mean what they used to. Everything is in the service of Power and Money. Think of it as "Newspeak" in a different form and amplified beyond belief. Everything has changed/will change further and the sane/rational amongst us will just have to find ways to cope with it.
I am not scared for AI overflowing the news sites with bullshit. We already have a fire hydrant worth of bullshit content produced for consumption. Lies and fakes have coexisted with humans forever. People did rumours, then we had books, press, radio, television, and now the Internet.
"But it's easier to produce lies/deepfakes today" -- true. However, the absolute cost of producing a lie per consumer already was negligible, and now it's even smaller.
People will recalibrate their level of trust in technology and move on.
There will be a lag period where everyone believes nonsense, and then hopefully everyone will catch on that inflammatory, low-content articles are usually lies, and maybe even start fact checking a little more so as to avoid looking stupid. And the world will be a slightly smarter place.
I can think of two directions we could go from where we are - perhaps Authorative Media: a return to the government telling us everything we need to know? Very dark, but a "government influencer" could still work..
And perhaps more positive - Truthful Media: Information generated by people, in the 'open source' way that you can fully trust. Hard to believe, but almost necessary. A blockchain of real information sources and trusted information processors (aka influencers), who give opinions that can be traced back to facts.
I think that perhaps glamour and fantasy will always win out - reality is boring and human nature wont get us to choose facts when fantasy gets our attention much more
While I agree on your first point, the rest completely misses that the public will continue to be tribal and instead only believe the talking heads of their given tribe as authentic in a world rife with deep fakes.
I fully expect the outcome to be increased tribalism, when faith in your tribe's leadership and information sources is the only source of comfort, confidence, and "truth".
I don't think it will be the opposite where everything is questioned and critical thinking suddenly becomes prolific as you seem to imply.
There's a good chance we'll look back on this as a post-truth era.
I have some guesses about underlying drivers, but they're just guesses. At the top, we have regulatory 'avoidance' masquerading as 'innovation', and enough regulators stood down for it to have consequences. We have the entire journalism industry brought to it's knees financially, and turning to low-quality opinion written predominantly by immature, inexperienced people. We have politics-- international actors leveraging social media to sow disinformation, and domestic actor(s) enthusiastically and successfully denying truths with impunity. And we have official sources of truth corrupted-- the trends above, and others led to ready availability of bad information in sources previously regarded as authoritative.
Unfortunately, the epicenter in many cases can be traced to changes in society and power brought about by the technology industry, which 'disrupted' society and replaced it with substitutes that empowered anti-factual narratives and personalities. The recipes for avoiding being scammed are nice, but this is a structural problem that shouldn't be laid at the feet of individual people unfortunate enough to be conned.
We kind of have that first-hand future already. Consider Trump's twitter feed. He speaks directly to the public, in a simple and direct way, largely immune to editing/manipulation. Sure, it's insane, but it's the most direct communication we've ever had from a president, and that's kind of impressive.
But in general, the problem with first hand sources is credibility. How do you know you can trust a first hand source you've never heard of? Are they giving us a complete or fair picture? Or are they either unintentionally or intentionally misleading us with incomplete/incorrect information?
I'd like to say the future is in credibility and integrity, but I fear that's actually the past. Now, people just believe what they want to believe, and pick and choose their facts to fit their internal narrative. It's nihilistic and terrifying, and I have no idea how society can resist it.
Seeing will no longer be believing and society will be forced to look at things with a more critical and skeptical eye or with a higher level of diligence. Value should also shift back to more legitimate sources.
Not to drag the thread in a political direction, but that's what I thought when Trump won the Presidency. Rather than a boost to our cognitive immunity, though, we're only seeing stronger polarization.
The transition will certainly suck though.
Exactly, only there's no sign of an end to the 'transition.' Today, the common person is more empowered than ever before to ignore what they don't want to hear.
The growing prevalence of this line of thinking explains the current "post truth" environment, wherein we are assaulted with disinformation from previously trustworthy institutions.
The prediction that institutions founded in a limited information environment (and their extant policies specifically) will simply continue in an unlimited information environment by simply changing rhetoric, are exactly that: predictions.
That is to say, if a hypothetical swindler cannot profitably swindle when the veracity of her lies are easily checked. The article proposes that our imaginary trickster need simply start telling the truth to continue prospering.
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