New World Same Humans #11
In 2020, we inhabit a long tail of confusion. Time for the return of the gatekeepers?
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
There are a lot of theories flying around these days.
I mean, theories on everything. On the season two finale of Succession. On the difference between introverts and extroverts. On Life, the Universe and Everything. And yes, on the origins and nature of the coronavirus outbreak.
In 2020 we are all theorists, ready to deploy our 280 characters at a moment’s notice. This week, I had some thoughts (developed a theory?) about what that means.
The long tail of confusion
When I was four my favourite story book was Chicken Licken.
For those who haven’t heard it, the story is as follows (spoiler alert): Chicken Licken is an ordinary chick, trying to live his best life in the countryside. Out of nowhere one day, an acorn falls on his head. In the absence of any clear evidence Licken decides that the sky is falling down. He starts on a mission to find the King, and tell him about this impending disaster. On his way he convinces a band of other friendly creatures, including a hen and a duck, to join him. Eventually, the posse meet a fox who assures them that he will take them straight to the King's palace. Overjoyed, Licken and his crew let the fox lead the way.
It doesn’t end well.
These days, I read Chicken Licken to my children. Like many of the best folk tales it’s a simple story designed to impart a few brutal truths to young minds: some people are mistaken, some people are bad, and credulousness can get you in big trouble.
In 2020 we are seeing that old truth manifested anew. Across the last two months, the EU’s Rapid Alert System for identifying serious disinformation campaigns has been directed towards media on the coronavirus. The team say they’ve identified hundreds of disinformation campaigns, each pushing messages that range from the absurd to the dangerous. For example: the coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab, and deployed as a biological weapon against the west. The coronavirus was created in a US lab, and deployed as a biological weapon against China. The coronavirus is a hoax. The pandemic is caused not by a virus, but by 5G networks. And so on.
A recent YouGov poll found that one in five Britons believe the coronavirus was created by Chinese scientists. Now, I have no privileged information on the source of the virus. Just as with everyone else, I’m left to try to make sense of what I hear in the news. But my advice to these people would be the same as that to Chicken Licken and his band of followers: back up the truck. In uncertain times here is a good rule: be wary of narratives that ask you to assign blame/ invest in certain power relations/believe elaborate conspiracies/travel to see the King. For the record, researchers at Ohio State University say that the virus shows no evidence of the kind of genetic engineering that should be present if it were a human creation.
All this, of course, is just the latest reminder of a phenomenon we’ve been talking about for years now. That is: post-truth. The word rose to prominence back in 2016. But our understanding of the way information behaves in a highly connected world is still limited.
The EU disinformation team say many of the coronavirus stories are coming from Russia. The political technologists of the Kremlin perfected their art in the theatre of domestic politics, where they funded puppet opposition parties, spread both pro and anti-Putin propaganda, and kept the editor of every newspaper on speed dial. The strategy was innovative and powerful: create a wave of dizzying informational chaos, and then surf it. When no one knows what to believe, you can make them believe anything. First it worked in Russia; then it worked everywhere.
That strategy was developed in the 1990s, back in the age of TV. But in 2020 it doesn’t take a cadre of highly organised propagandists to confuse millions of people. Instead, we inhabit a Long Tail of Confusion; an age of peer-to-peer disinformation. It’s been observed many times that the fragmentation of media is in part responsible for a more polarized, less coherent public discourse – but it remains a powerful truth. Back when entire nations watched the same few TV channels, and read the same handful of newspapers, there was a shared public consciousness that gave a basis for some kind of consensus. Meanwhile, media gatekeepers – yes, those monsters that the early internet pioneers were so proud to sweep away – prevented the most egregious lies from surfacing into the mainstream. Today, by contrast, a billion online users and more fall down their own media wormhole every morning. They’re left to navigate an informational terrain by turns mistaken, obscure, malign and insane. Some don’t do a very good job of it.
We sometimes talk about all this – a fragmented public consciousness, the lack of a shared narrative – as though it’s entirely new. In truth, it’s probably something closer to a return to the way things have always been – apart from during a strange interval that ran from the mid 20th-century until recently, when a omnipresent, one-to-many mainstream media managed briefly to get everyone facing in the same direction.
The new part, though, is the re-emergence of an information free-for-all in a highly connected world. Because a connected world means information can be weaponized as never before. When a contemporary Chicken Licken decides the Sky is Falling, he doesn’t have to limit himself to a small band of believers. Instead, he can collect tens of millions of followers.
We’ve already seen how damaging that can be to the collective. Now, the pandemic is another powerful reminder that truth and rationality matter, and that we need to protect our public discourse. The underlying reality of this virus is not a matter of opinion, but scientific fact. People can, and will, die because of bad information.
So what to do?
On the short-term challenge of the pandemic, all that can be done is to ruthlessly seek out and destroy bad information. To their credit, Twitter and Facebook are taking action.
Long-term, the answer is of course complex. But it feels that much of it revolves around an underlying imperative. One that’s easy to say but hard to enact. Those on the side of reason and truth need to be more assertive in their defence of a coherent, rational, truthful public conversation. Take mainstream journalism, for example: over the past two decades and more it has too often been bedevilled by a ‘both sides’ approach to balanced reporting. The result are a million articles and TV reports on climate change that quote the scientific consensus (it’s happening and caused by people) and then ‘for balance’ quote an opposing view (it’s all a hoax, it snowed last year, look, an ice sculpture of Kim and Kanye!)
The pioneers of the early internet promised a shiny new age of enlightenment. Newspaper editors, broadcast journalists, radio controllers – these were the stuffy gatekeepers standing between us and a truly democratized, universal conversation in service of a better world. That promise tapped into long-running trends – the decline of deference to authority, the rise of an assertive equality – that can be traced back through the social revolution of the 1960s, through the disenchantment with elites after WWI, and beyond.
There is much that is good about those trends. We were right to rid ourselves of unthinking deference to ‘our betters’, and to seek a world in which all can have a voice. But in our push to recognise that all people deserve equal consideration, we’ve too often fallen into the mistaken feeling that all viewpoints deserve equal consideration, too. In fact, all human beings are of equal value, but all viewpoints are not. Some viewpoints are informed, and some are not. Some are intelligent, and some are not. Some are true, and some are not.
It’s time we got comfortable, again, with those distinctions. That doesn’t mean we fall back into a self-satisfied, elitist culture that excludes viewpoints it doesn’t like and people it doesn’t value. The work of building a better public conversation never ends. A commitment to reason means we accept that what we call knowledge is always contingent, liable to be overturned by new evidence. And that we remain mindful that no one has a monopoly on the truth.
The dominance of the old elites, and the former gatekeepers, is over. Even if we wanted to, we can’t bring it back. But in the 21st-century we’ll need to build new hierarchies of information, and find new ways to guard the gates that protect them. We can have total informational equality, or we can have a coherent and rational collective conversation. We can’t have both.
No dinner parties for you
Three super-quick snippets.
In normal times I’d say: use these to look clever at dinner parties! But let’s be real: you’re going nowhere. So you’ll just have to use these on your partner, housemates, children, or dog.
A massive reduction in human activity is changing the way the Earth moves.
The UN is partnering with Chinese tech giant Tencent, which (among other things) produces software used for surveillance by the Chinese state.
Bill Gates is funding seven different factories to pursue a coronavirus vaccine. The strategy will cost billions of dollars, but should get to a usable vaccine faster.
Gimme some truth
Thanks for reading this week.
If you want to share your thoughts on this note, fill me in on your lockdown lifestyle, or simply say hi, I’m always here. Just email newworldsamehumans@gmail.com.
Be well,
David.
P.S: Nikki Ritmeijer is the brilliant designer behind the illustrations in this email, and that's the truth.