If the truth hurts, we can help you avoid it altogether
Plus the AI expiration date (yeah you wish)
Charlie Warzel got worried perhaps before the rest of us. In December 2017, he looked back at the year that had gone by—Donald Trump’s first year as president—and declared that “2017 Was The Year That The Internet Destroyed Our Shared Reality”. He’d watched Trump completely lie about events in the August of that year, and for the dialogue around those events then completely diverge, with neither side able or willing to acknowledge the other side’s version:
Outside the rally [in August], Trump’s remarks set off a familiar, self-perpetuating cycle — an awkward media dance of fact-checking and contextualizing that, no matter how objective, paints the media as Trump sees it: an oppositional force. Seconds after Trump wrapped, CNN’s Don Lemon denounced the speech, calling it “a total eclipse of the facts” and “an attempt to rewrite history."
…The narrative had been set. Trump claims he's a victim, blames the media; the media becomes combative; his victimhood deepens, becomes part of the identity of his followers. Trump creates his version of reality and we end up in it one way or another.
The promise—implicit, rather than explicit—of the internet and the World Wide Web was that we would all be enlightened. Tim Berners-Lee originally developed the web software to help organise the development of the Large Hadron Collider while he was working at Cern. Good news! It worked perfectly. The LHC came into service in 2010, after ten years of construction starting in 1998 and two years of tweaking. But in the meantime, the web reached ordinary people who are not scientists, and wow what a mess we made of it all.
Warzel has, if anything, become gloomier about everything since he wrote that (Buzzfeed News) 2017 piece. Buzzfeed News is of course no more; Trump outlasted it, along with many other media properties which were less able to rely on people handing over their money happily for watches with crazy markups, Chinese-printed Bibles, dubious NFTs and equally dubious crypto. (All those latter are Trump things in the past year, and it’s not even worth linking to them because they’re so absurd.)
Last week, Warzel wrote a piece, this time for The Atlantic, titled “I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is”. (The slug says “hurricane-milton-conspiracies-misinformation”, which will at least pin down when it happened for future archivists.)
It starts:
The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality.
That 2017 piece was the groundwork, but he feels that now we’ve reached the point where there’s nothing to be done.
To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories, and public servants battle death threats, is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
This is the real point of his essay: people like to have their prejudices and misplaced beliefs strengthened by what they consume online. When it comes to the most important topic around—who runs the country in the US, which has serious effects on the rest of the world, from Russia to Ukraine to Taiwan to the Middle East—people will believe anything about the other side. In effect they’ll believe anything at any time. The most classic example of this was in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton, when an AI-generated photo went viral, and was tweeted by a (Republican) committee member, who had learned enough to be online but not to recognise AI photos.
The Community Note (at the bottom) took a little while to appear, of course. And once it did? She followed up:
“It’s seared into my mind forever”. Well, sure, though it depends how soft your mind is: softer the better for a nice bit of searing. Don’t ever retreat or say you were wrong. Never explain, never apologise. The byword of Roy Cohn, Trump’s lawyer (and in some ways tutor) have become the foundational principle of western politics.
There are similar examples to be found on the other side: it’s not so long ago that any suggestion that Joe Biden perhaps wasn’t the most vivacious presidential candidate ever would have led to you being denounced online by hundreds of furious people. Everyone likes to lie to themselves about their own beliefs: we decide quickly, but rationalise slowly, and so our response to things we agree with, or disagree with tends to be immediate. It gets seared into our minds, so to speak.
Perhaps the problem is that there’s so much content coming at us from all over that our natural defences are up all the time. We don’t have the time to make the careful, rational assessment of everything that comes at us because there’s just so much. So we just filter it with our rapid filtering: agree, agree, disagree, discard, ignore, embrace. You believe there are weeping children wearing lifejackets cuddling soaking puppies in boats on flooded streets because, look, there must be someone fitting that description somewhere? The people who shoot down these ideas tend to be those who have been trained to pause before evaluating—scientists, lawyers, journalists, statisticians, and the properly sceptical. (I may have missed some professions off—feel welcome to add them.) There’s also a cohort of the professionally sceptical, who simply go around saying things aren’t true (such as the “DNHOTY”, or “Did Not Happen Of The Year” account) , but they’re part of the problem just as much as those who believe stuff too easily.
The social warming message—if it needs to be explicit—is the one that Warzel is making: not only are people becoming more polarised as a result of social media, but they’re becoming harder to persuade out of it, because there’s more and more content which will reset them back in their prior position.
It takes a surprising amount of mental effort to move yourself out of one belief to another. (The example I cite about myself is how I stopped thinking that SARS-Cov-2 was transmitted via surfaces, which I believed because I’d seen the 2011 film Contagion which said that about flu, and because the government in 2020 had lots of messaging about “washing hands”. Within a few months—I can’t pinpoint when, though—it was obvious that it was airborne, and so I took up that view, and discounted all the claims about surface transmission.) And most people aren’t willing to do that; it’s too much effort and might involve explaining themselves. Social media and the modern media landscape makes it much easier to continue in the thinking you already have, whatever that is, no matter how outlandish. Like Warzel, I find it hard to explain how bad this is. Worse, I can’t immediately see the way out of it. I sure hope there is one. But we might have to prepare for a future where there isn’t.
Glimpses of the AI tsunami
(Of the what? Read here. And then the update.)
• I heard an interview on the radio where a job recruiter said that they didn’t like those applying for jobs to use AI to write their CVs. “But will they be expected to use AI when they’re working for you?” asked the interviewer. Oh yes, the recruiter said. (I find this weird.)
• Parents sue school that gave bad grade to student who used AI to complete assignment. Good to know that AI isn’t going to put lawyers out of work.
• ChatGPT (and other chatbots) will write you a horoscope. Except it won’t call it a horoscope; it’ll answer the question “From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself?” Which tech bros fall for, apparently.
• The AI boom has an expiration date. Given that the proponents of AI have said artificial general intelligence will be here in 2030 (or so), we have a time when we can check back and find out. Right?
• Such are the power demands for AI processing that Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all signed up, in one way or another, to get nuclear power plants to supply them with energy because they provide constant (baseline) power.
• You can buy Social Warming in paperback, hardback or ebook via One World Publications, or order it through your friendly local bookstore. Or listen to me read it on Audible.
You could also sign up for The Overspill, a daily list of links with short extracts and brief commentary on things I find interesting in tech, science, medicine, politics and any other topic that takes my fancy.
• I’m the proposed Class Representative for a lawsuit against Google in the UK on behalf of publishers. If you sold open display ads in the UK after 2014, you might be a member of the class. Read more at Googleadclaim.co.uk. (Or see the press release.)
• Back next week! Or leave a comment here, or in the Substack chat, or Substack Notes, or write it in a letter and put it in a bottle so that The Police write a song about it after it falls through a wormhole and goes back in time.