I have open-loop free-written on the topic of our collapsing methods of making meaning.
As usual, this is provisional, and doesn’t yet feel like I have landed on the core of what I want to say.
Lots of interesting side-alleys though.
Summary
Our faculties for making meaning have always been in a process of renewal. Old methods fade, and new ones replace them. I suspect the pace of this regeneration is at an especially high clip right now. Some examples: we have a social media coded president, we are in an advanced position on the s-curve of exploiting current level info tech (ie wringing the last drops of blood from the stone of attention)1, and there are several aggressive state actors. All that contributes to the rushed feeling of the information environment. The most probable is the electronic/computational revolution that is very much unfinished at the moment. It is unclear to me that the acceleration will continue or a new equilibrium will be eventually reached. The evidence needed to settle that question is likely years or decades away.
The transition period is rough, we are drowning in a deluge of unvetted information, disinformation, analysis, and raw data. Profit-biased mainstream (formerly) media is in a hot war with the internet. On the other side is a legion of “post world” algorithmically intensifying viral-coded news-like clickbait pieces. And don’t get me started on the various flavors of slop (from SEO recipes to shrimp Jesus and Pope drip), all of it urgently competing for our attention. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is some sort of crisis of legibility.
The old reliable markers of trustworthy meaning makers have been worn out, and they weren’t what we thought anyway. It’s all being unmade and remade right now. We can find a standard that reasonable people would accept for the necessary inputs to making up our own minds. One of those inputs is a luxury of time to consume and digest the information fully before making a decision. There are a multitude of fronts where directing our attention would benefit in decision making (climate change, political will, homelessness, healthcare, taxes, you name it), and it is that very attention that is so desired by all the marketers and industrialists. It’s a real conflict of interest.
One challenge is that we’ve learned that a persuasive tale can look deceptively like the truth. The credibility component is an entirely independent variable easily isolated from the reality-based truth component. Entire industries (psyops, advertising, PR agencies) have been developed around this separation; it’s a natural consequence of the information age. And that is the fully developed form of the duality of subjective (imagined) and objective (physical/real) realities. Reality has its subjective uses and its objective uses, both are valid.
Another parallel here is the alignment problem in artificial intelligence. It may be a matter of what we humans recognize as goals, but we ought to be operating in the easy version of the problem right now with only other humans to contend with, for example sharing non-enshittified news that is actually useful and helpful. We are failing miserably on some axes in this easy case. Compare that to the much more challenging problem of an alien or artificial intelligence with unknowable goals.
The consumer is ultimately responsible for what they consume. But the incentives and structures of the system they inhabit contribute.
It’s not just conmen that we need to be wary of, there are confidence structures that are doing the swindle too. (Check that this is clearly listed above.)
We may be in a bifurcation scenario: those that choose (or can afford) to do the work of being discriminating about their information intake will sort into one group, and those that passively sop it all up are in a different group. I am looking for evidence that this sorting happens and what the real effect is. Those in the second group already appear to inhabit a world haunted by demons, and it’s impacting the world of the rest of us too.
The break-and-patch method of corporate optimization may or may not be successfully applied to the social institutions that we all depend on. The interdependency of this system is complex and not well understood; its resiliency is untested. We may be in for a surprise.
The current information saturation point is an echo of the witch hysteria that occurred at the beginning of the printing press era (check facts here). There were so many reports that even if only a small percentage were true, that would be too many witches.
Resonant Phrases
“collapse as a continuous process of renewing”
“Collectively constructed subjective reality”
“subjective reality has a lot of force in the world”
“agentic authority”
“Maximally convincing”
“Break-and-patch governance”
“A preponderance of evidence of witches”
“Printing with electrons is far cheaper even than buying ink by the barrel.”
Open Loops
We ourselves do not have the capacity to make legible meaning of all aspects of our lives. It’s overwhelming. What do we farm out, what do we reserve sovereignty for, and what do we say “I don’t know” to? Where are the limits? Omniscience is a fools errand.
Why has the amount of stuff rammed into our eyeballs escalated so extremely? Cheaper tech has lead to screens everywhere, and something must go on them, but why do we do this to ourselves?
What are the limits of the alignment analogy that I use? What is and isn’t alignment?
Is the bifurcation scenario even plausible? Find examples that already exist.
Ref: 25.2p66
One thing that is nice about free writing by hand is that I can’t go back and mince words, only forward.
The only latitude afforded me is this sentence, this next phrase block that I am writing now.
It compels motion, and pushes me away from second guessing or trying to find an improvement to what I just said.
I mean, I can rewrite it again in the next line, but I haven’t adopted that habit yet.
What I mean here is that we’ve developed a lot of tools and technology for computing and manufacturing, and now we’re late in the game of optimizing all of them to extract as much value as possible. There is a lot of surface area to apply that optimization too, so consequently a lot of things begin to change. The last mile is things like computer screens in refrigerators (now with ads!), washing machines that can text you when they need more detergent, popovers for the popups on the SEO drivel recipe sites, and surely coming soon: targeted ads in the AI generated slop video, chats, and music. ↑