Lying is not a new thing right, putting spin on information is not a new thing, being wrong about something isn’t a new thing.
Intentionally trying to control the narrative for purposes of narrative warfare and information warfare aren’t new things either. You can read about them in Sun Tzu and other thousands of year-old military doctrine texts on how to control the population through making false enemies and deception.
So, this has always been a thing, like very active disinformation. How do you have some of your messengers carry a message about the attack plan that you know they'll be captured, so the other side gets the secret intel, and the whole thing was a farce to get them to make the wrong choice? This is a craftiness that's been around for thousands of years.
But we've also worked on counter strategies. How do we become divergent and vehement? So, it has been degrading. There are a bunch of reasons I won’t cover all of them, but I will address a couple of the main ones so people understand it because the solution space requires understanding the problem space. That’s actually a general kind of principle of sense-making. As the saying by Charles Kettering goes, 'A problem fully understood is only half solved.' But it also means a problem not fully understood is pretty much unsolvable. So, we typically have very superficial understandings of problems, don’t understand the generator and the ethology of them well enough, and what they’re connected to, and we try to jump straight to solutions. So, the solutions are either gibberish or actually bad, and then they engender counter-responses for understandable reasons.
So, to try to understand the problem of the breakdown in sense-making a little more, so we can think about adequate solutions.
One of the biggest things, and this has been talked about on Rebel Wisdom before, I believe you’ve had Tristan Harris on who talks about this very centrally, is the movement from news being largely broadcast media mediated to decentralized media mediated, which was the internet and then not just the internet but the large internet information curation platforms, Facebook in particular, but also YouTube and various others.
It’s important to understand why this is such a big deal. All of our global institutions evolved in the context of broadcast media. From the printing press to the telegram to radio to TV, it was still a small number of groups being able to have some narrative on what’s true and be able to broadcast, and everybody gets that.
Now, of course, that means it was susceptible to very centralized control and capture, but at least when everybody was watching CNN, they at least all saw the same base reality. They could agree or disagree, maybe they were informed or misinformed, but there was at least some basis of what they’re being exposed to because right now people are really riled up over issues that they have no on-the-ground knowledge of, like they weren’t on the ground where the shooting was, they weren’t in Beirut, they aren’t in North Korea, so their sense of what’s going on is mediated to the media, right through what’s coming through this kind of 2D screen.
And so, there was in broadcast at least a sense of shared base information about the world beyond my own experience, my own direct experience. As soon as we started to get to the internet, there was this very libertarian beautiful idea that it would democratize broadcast. So, rather than a few billionaires able to control broadcast, you could go to YouTube and everybody could broadcast, and so it would democratize the ability to share information. And then if it was true that we had kind of a market of rational actors who would parse the information and up-regulate the signal of the best stuff, wouldn’t that be awesome?
Of course, nearly the exact opposite thing happened because so much broadcast gets put up that I Google something and I get a billion search results for anything. Well, I can never read through a billion search results to be a rational actor and make sense of that entire space, nor can I do the deep parsing on any one of those things. So then of the billion search results which ones do I actually see, that became one of the big problems, was how do we curate the content to show the people the stuff that they want to see?
Well, now that starts to become a big problem. So, you get something like Facebook, for instance, having a tremendous amount of ability to harvest very particular information about me, that is unique to me, not just even a demographic. Whereas the broadcast news on TV didn’t have that. I could tell if I turned it on or turned it off, and that was about it, but I wasn’t interacting with it in a way that could give me a tremendous amount of personalized micro-targeting information.
But now I’m on Facebook, and what I like and what I share and what I comment on, what my mouse hovers over, the analytics of all of that are such that after I’ve done about 300 likes, Facebook can predict better than my spouse, and after I have gone further, it actually has a psychographic profile on me that is asymmetric to anything that any human, CIA agent, or whatever could have ever had previously.
And that was co-occurring with me carrying my cell phone around all the time that is tracking stuff that I’m doing and using notifications to give me a continuous feed. So, there’s a radical increase in the amount of input into my mind space and the amount of data being harvested about me across platforms to be able to micro-target which ones I should see.
Now, it happens to be that we think of Facebook or YouTube or whatever as a tool, but it is actually a corporate interest that has agency that is not just a tool. So, those corporations make money by selling advertising, selling information, and they sell more advertising by maximizing my engagement and maximizing my time on site.
Well, I don’t want to spend that much time scrolling Facebook because I have things to do. So, if I stay in my prefrontal rational cortex, I will check it real quickly and then go because I have stuff to do. But I’ll spend more time if I get limbically hijacked, if I get into social FOMO, like am I going to miss out on what’s happening, or if I get outraged or scared or whatever it is. So, I’m also not going to spend that much time on stuff that is foreign to me, as stuff I already know is important.
So what happens is that the AI that is paying attention to what I engage with the most that is curating all of the information on Facebook or the internet to me is curating what is stickiest. And what is stickiest is very much like foods that are addictive are usually bad for you. Salad's not that addictive; French fries are much more addictive. Information that is maximally sticky is usually appealing to dopaminergic hijacks. So what it curates for us is a combination of bias and limbic hijack, which is outrage, group identity, and certainty.
And so now what we have is a situation where, because there’s so much stuff online, the curation platforms, and it’s important to understand that the AIs that are doing that are radically more powerful than the AI that several years ago beat Kasparov at chess. Like, a much more powerful game-theoretic AI than that is controlling the information feed of what I believe to try to maximize stickiness, and I don’t even realize I’m playing that game.
This is an asymmetric information warfare that is unlike the symmetry that ever could exist in the past, this is so many orders of magnitude more asymmetric.
