Truth And Forgiveness In The Time Of TikTok

July 26, 2024

Greg here - I’m trying something new! This was just published on my Substack: Brains Are Plastic. I’m working to get into a groove and a regular posting schedule there. Please head over and subscribe!

The last month has been the most politically momentous of my lifetime. To paraphrase Stalin, it’s been a few weeks where decades happen.

I started writing some of the original notes here before the debate. Remember that simpler world? Way back then, I thought the two most common words we’d hear for the next few months would be “convicted” and “felon”. It was already a very different election cycle, one that would challenge the normal spectrum of voting decisions and public opinions.

Then the debate happened and everything changed. The American Public, which doesn’t agree on anything, agrees that Joe Biden is too old for the next election. And the entire media and the celebrity-political caste was split in a bunch of entertaining ways:

Their previous position held that any criticism was age-ist and the real problem was that cheapfakes abound. Then suddenly they’ve had a synchronized spasm, the shades have been removed, and they can see clearly now with their own eyes and senses. Even Joe Scarborough who, just weeks before, said this was intellectually “the best Biden ever”.
The wild juxtaposition that Trump represents “an existential threat to democracy” but that the most important thing, according to Biden, is that he does “the goodest job he can.”
Republican joy at watching the spasmodic machinations of the DNC as it’s held hostage by a doddering 81-year-old man is wildly shortsighted considering just 8 years ago it was held hostage by an unintelligible, philandering reality star.
Democrats have an elite collective action problem wherein everyone has had to kowtow to the line that “we’re ridin with Biden” (that was Schumer) and yet they all want him to drop out. Nobody wants to be seen as Brutus in public - not only because they want to be good party apparatchiks, but also because then the public will rightly question them. “You knew this was the situation and you said nothing?”
The unelected assistants and staffers and whatever-you-call-them in the White House have zero incentive to do anything except keep the old man upright because right now they’re running the country. Power is nice. Power is fun. Scandal is bad. Coverup is scary. Hold the line.
“Democracy” is being overused as the solution to everything from White House press conferences to the DNC’s upcoming convention and delegate problem. Let’s be clear: Biden is NOT a democratically chosen DNC candidate. Primaries were skipped and party leaders preselected delegates months ago. This is uncommon even with an incumbent president.
There’s the intensely cringeworthy reversals and handwringing of a mainstream media that has finally put the nail in whatever credibility it had left.

All of this would be wildly entertaining and fun to watch if we weren’t talking about the most powerful position on Earth, the decline and fall of the Fourth Estate, the failure of both political parties to escape a prisoner’s dilemma, and the Boomer generation’s inability to move past their geriatric stranglehold on power. I mean, it’s been entertaining but it’s also very sad.

And then history changes again, and an assassin is able to actually put a bullet in Trump. And we get the most iconic American photo of the 21st century because somehow that unintelligible philandering reality star has the courage and audacity to stand up immediately after being shot, raise a fist, and shout “FIGHT!” The crowd goes wild and chants “USA!” What a plot twist. Full credit to Evan Vucci, who should win a Pulitzer. What are the odds that Trump can now say he was shot in the least debilitating way possible? Meanwhile, something like 1 in 4 Democratic voters are genuinely wondering if the whole thing was staged and Joy Reid is asking if Trump really got shot in the ear. Senators cornered the Secret Service director in a stairwell. And there have been no right-wing counter-protests or riots. You know, all those Republicans with all the guns.

But that was two weeks ago, and the world has practically forgotten about it all. Because since then ol’ Joe’s gotten COVID, retired to Delaware to meet some peopl-— sorry, self-isolate, and sent a missive via X that he’s dropping out. We’re pretty sure he knew his aides were going to post that, but we’re not sure. They forgot to mention they were backing Kamala, so that came out 30 minutes later. And suddenly, now that Biden’s doing what all the elites want him to do, the levels of sycophantic praise are at all new highs. It’s the most patriotic, the noblest, most selfless act of history!

Gosh, I haven’t even mentioned JD Vance, or the crazy Republican convention, or Kamala the border czar, or right-wingers doing the horrible cancel culture thing, or any number of other subplots. It’s impossible to keep up with everything. Not that it matters with everyone already in a corner. There’s no forgiveness to be had anywhere, no quarter given. But blame is always readily available and it’s being doled out by the gallon. We got an hour or two of “thoughts and prayers” after Trump was shot but then it was straight back to the “threat to Democracy” line. And Trump— has Trump ever said sorry for anything? He had a moment of self-awareness at a rally recently where he talked about his not-so-perfect combover. That was a remarkable amount of introspection. A touch of humility would be a shade too far.

elections

But the most impactful trend line through the last weeks has been the perception and reality around Biden. Regardless of your political leanings, this has been the political car crash of our lifetimes. It’s been a climax of the media trends we’ve all felt over the last few years. The algorithms feed us more content, we click and scroll, and we get more of the same because we like it. Despite what we’ve seen with our own eyes, the mainstream media has been working double time to change the past so that they can control the present. The memory hole is a real place, Winston.

Even more than the political machinations of an election - and I’m going to make a prediction here that 2028 is just as wild and crazy as 2024 - our relationship with media is the big story in all of this. We consume, on average, 8 hours of media every day, most of it from social media and on our phones. It’s changing our world and it’s changing us. We think in spurts of dopamine and audience reach. We

But to start, I want to go back to the 1960s to the most trusted man in America.

The Way It Is

It’s hard now for us to imagine the media landscape of the 60s and 70s when only three TV networks dominated the news cycle. Of the three, Walter Cronkite was the most popular and the most notable. He became known as the most trusted man in America and he took this seriously. He ended every nightly show with his famous tagline: “And that’s the way it is.” Every show except the nights that ended with his own opinion or commentary. When he gave his famous Vietnam War editorial just a month before Nixon announced the end of the war, his broadcast ended with: “This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”

Cronkite was a journalist and he took his journalistic role seriously. He found it paramount to distinguish between truth and opinion and he gained the enduring trust of a nation for it. In these halcyon 20th century days, the amount of information and its velocity was still severely limited. We had no internet and TV stations broadcast signals through the air. The reason there were only 3 big TV networks was because that’s all our technology could handle - there’s only so much VHF signal spectrum. We wanted more - we always want more - but we couldn’t get it. The ideas of truth were simpler and the relationship between truth and trust was easier to manage.

But why does the amount of information matter? To get a sense of the raw differences in information and consumption habits over time, I worked with Claude to build some plausible estimates of what people saw each day and what was available. Claude pulled information from scientific studies, Statista, and other sources and built some tables. (See Footnote: Information Growth)

As a species, we’ve gone from creating mere gigabytes a day to exabytes. For those that still aren’t fans of those obnoxious Greek prefixes, that’s 100,000 times more content per day. We only consume a tiny little sliver of all that data each day, but what we each consume is still 100 times more content than what our grandparents saw just a couple of generations ago.

There’s a part of this that feels very comforting. Every time I see the next Great Big Calamity plastered on the proverbial front page, these numbers remind me that there have always been calamities and that we humans have grown far more efficient in recording every single one of them from multiple angles and in 4K. And everyone can comment too! There’s a breakdown of everything from every perspective and model.

fakenews

Imagine if Krakatoa erupted tomorrow. We’d know about it instantly (where were you when you heard Trump was shot?). We’d have views from boats, views of waves hitting nearby islands, views of devastation, views of beautiful beaches that were spared. There would be commentary and official content from those helping at the disaster directly, from the left decrying the capitalist economy that led to this calamity, from the right complaining about the inability of these socialists to help, and from the comparative literature crowd comparing the Victorian cultural reactions to volcanoes with the 21st century reality.

“The gaze of the historian [is directed] towards extraordinary events … historians resemble collectors: both gathered only rare and curious objects, disregarding whatever looked banal, everyday, normal… History was an idiographic discipline, having as its object that which does not repeat itself.” -Krzysztof Pomian

There are constantly momentous events happening all around the world. We record and consume and react to more of them. Some people think the world is worse and some people think the world is better.

I think we’re so consumed by the amount and speed of information that we don’t know how to tell.

Algorithms For Understanding

The prevailing narrative is that the internet and social media has killed the legacy media. Local newspapers, for example, are nearly all dead and the ones that survived have turned into online publications following the same attention trends as everyone else.

But I think the amount of data we generate and consume has changed so dramatically that we’ve needed to build new new mechanisms and algorithms to manage and process it all. History and technology has made the world smaller. The tools we had before to make sense of the world - radio and TV and newspapers published daily or weekly - became inadequate. We wanted more because our brains were capable of more. Internet media consumption is a continuous evolution of algorithms and technology, adapting to the demands of our world. The media innovations of the last thirty years have centered around two key aspects: connection and compression.

As speed and data increased, we’ve come up with new ways to connect with others that share our interests and perspectives. We build communities around niche domains. Just as there are now hundreds of TV channels (TV tore away the VHF shackles long ago), there are over 100,000 reddit communities. There’s not just a single photography subreddit, there are portrait communities, urban exploration groups, and analog (darkroom) groups, all with millions of members. Niching down like this has given more people the opportunity to focus on being an expert in a very specific area. And it has allowed audiences to build around whatever ideas receive attention. Imagine a TV producer greenlighting a mukbang show in the 90s! It would never happen. But there are plenty of Youtubers supporting themselves doing mukbang to the delight (and horror) of millions. There is a place for every hobby, every fetish, every opinion. Today, everything is mainstream and nothing is fringe.

As we’ve connected more, we’ve compressed more too. Humans can absorb visual information at warp speed. Our optic nerve bandwidth limits our visual information intake (about 125 KB/s) but we’re also incredible at dialing into the most important details in a visual field.

TV provided more information per second than radio. According to one of his writers, Walter Cronkite was focused on pushing the number of seconds per story down from 20 seconds to 15 so he could fit 4 per minute of broadcast time instead of 3. The internet increased the possibility of our consumption first, which is why broadband and high speed internet became critically important. Once the infrastructure was in place, video started taking over. Consumer-level innovations like infinite scroll allowed us to more completely saturate time spent. And in the last couple of years, we’ve seen a new video innovation in cut speed. Popular videos today are expected to cut every few seconds - sometimes every second - so the creator can put together the most desirable (read: compressed) content. This is the TikTok-ification of all video. We see it in everything from Biden’s debate announcement to new kid shows like CocoMelon. (It’s debatable which is more concerning.)

There are plenty of casualties in the race for more, faster connection, but perhaps none are as consequential as the norms we share face-to-face. Much like the driver that feels anonymous and let’s loose in rage behind the wheel of their car, online we cut off our ability to see the humanity of our follows and our followers. They become objects to us and we lose our humility (as someone with an audience) and our power of forgiveness (as a follower). Performances are expected from these parasocial relationships instead of intimacy.

We’re trying to connect with as many people as we can as quickly as we can. And we’re failing at it. But connection and compression are the two new rules of the game. And it is a game.

Legible Games

Back in 1997, Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue - the first time ever a computer beat a chess world champion. Since then, chess programs have gotten so much better that the top human players would be very lucky to even draw one game in a hundred.

Instead of killing chess, this enlivened it. Chess engines are used as tools to understand positions and sacrifices and new lines. Top players have teams that do staggering amounts of research on openings and options. The game is more competitive than in 1997 and, thanks in part to Youtube, the popularity of chess is higher than ever.

At the highest levels today, young players learn and memorize theoretical openings 20 or 30 moves long where one mistake can cause major problems. Magnus Carlsen now has what he calls a “young player strategy”. He intentionally makes a non-optimal move early, usually one that has rarely or never been played before. This may give him a slight positional disadvantage but it forces the young players off their known lines. It takes the players away from their theory and research and forces them to play “intuitional” chess - to rely exclusively on their skills and tactics in the game. You can imagine what happens next. Carlsen is the GOAT.

Carlsen understands what it means to be game theory optimal. He knows that in every situation there is a best move but that sometimes the best move for him is something else.

Games and systems of all types have become vastly more legible in the last couple of decades. From chess to baseball to basketball to poker, teams and players are expected to know the options and their probabilities of success. Top poker players will intentionally switch strategies between playing to the expected value of their hands and playing tighter or looser.

Every system that is sufficiently legible is reduced to game theory. The question is whether the GTO move is really optimal or whether the system has advanced to the point where players need to move beyond GTO moves. This is where poker and chess are today. The best players oscillate between GTO and human moves. But no matter what their actions are, they understand the GTO system. The system is legible to them and they read the system comprehensively.

Our media and communication systems are far more legible too. SEO started way back in the 90s when webmasters tried to make sure their sites were indexed by Yahoo and Excite. It was supercharged in the aughts under Google’s avuncular gaze. And today there are rules and metrics for every media system. The moderate political pundit making an extreme point to get views and reach on X is no different than the webmaster making sure the right keywords are hit in the first paragraph.

Marshall McLuhan coined his famous phrase “the medium is the message” way back in the 1960s. McLuhan saw that the form of communication had at least as much meaning as the content being delivered. The rules and metrics might be slightly different across the internet, but they’re all governed by connection and compression.

Truth and Trust

Connection and compression are seemingly innocuous metrics but they have combined to do something remarkable. They’ve made us all value trust over truth.

When we connect with someone, when we get emotionally invested in them, they become closer and more important to us. Similarly, when we’re willing to attach something to our identity - say, our religion - it becomes more rigid and less malleable. An invariant. We naturally magnify those with the same identity and diminish those we see as enemies to our identity. We use language to manipulate emotion through conjugation, as Bertrand Russell first pointed out in the 1940s. And there’s always someone to identify with because of the proliferation of niches and communities

Emotion and identity are forces of connection, but compression compels us to rely on them exclusively. With the speed of information today, it’s impossible to research every story and opinion and find out the facts. Fact-checkers sprouted up in the last decade to mitigate, but now nobody trust the fact-checkers either. Wikipedia edit histories are reviewed constantly. Even if we wanted to find the truth, we are forced - by system incentives and the amount of information - to fall back on sources of trust. But the sources of trust have exploded too. We’re so far beyond the days of Walter Cronkite that everyone has their own personalized news feed through TikTok, Twitter/X and Instagram. There’s so much information available that pundits practice a new sort of reverse hermeneutics by splicing together the content fragments that match the interpretation they espouse. You can make anyone sound like they’re saying anything, and we haven’t even talked about AI yet.

There are no shared sources of trust. That’s so important that I’ll say it again.

There are no shared sources of trust.

What does this mean? It means that all of the sensemaking institutions, the influencers, the celebrities, the political pundits, the politicians themselves are all playing the same game and competing on the same field. All of these influence-warriors are looking for eyeballs and they’ll do whatever the system demands to get them. It’s not just for money. In ages past, money was equated with power. But money has been supplanted by a new kingmaker. Our new generation of influence is seeking attention. And our current systems easily translate attention into power and money both.

We need to stop deluding ourselves to believe the battle has anything to do with truth. It’s entirely focused on attention and trust.

Power and Forgiveness

I’ve tried to explain, but like the problem itself there is too much. Let me sum up:

Our technological and cultural advances increased both the speed and amount of information by several OOMs.
This forced us to innovate and create new technology to manage and process all this information.
Most of this innovation has centered around creating more connection and more compression.
Actors in these ecosystems have learned to focus more on the system itself and the incentives provided to them to win the game. The incentives converge on owning our attention and, following McLuhan’s prescient argument, the medium has become the message.
These changes have completed the subversion of truth for trust. Emotion and identity have become tools in the attention game.

And here we are in 2024 with a batshit crazy election that would be rejected as too unrealistic as a political thriller. We’re all fried but we can’t peel our eyes away from our personalized feed. We’re all ready to blame all the bad guys. The elites. The proles. The right. The left. The other side. The Other. And yet strangely, since blame is so easy to come by these days, we don’t know the truth.

The number one thing all of us needs right now is forgiveness. Humility. Introspection.

Politics has always been bad at this. Politics is fundamentally about governing and power, and so politicians are totally adverse to saying “I am a part of the problem.” If Biden or Trump or Harris were able to say that out loud - not just “Unity!” or “turn down the temperature” or whatever - but that this actually applies to me too and I am culpable, they would win hearts and minds in a unique way.

The systems we have won’t let them or any of us do that. The political system hardly ever let politicians do that, but the everyday systems we all use for hours now won’t let us do that either. The incredible innovation that has happened over the last few decades, the incredible growth in information and connection have taken away our ability to use some of our most powerful human traits.

Social media is antagonistic to forgiveness. Antagonistic to humility. Antagonistic to admitting that we’re wrong. This is not the performance our audience wants. They want mountain tops and hero songs and car crashes. Every second. All the time. At a personal level, social media amputates critical parts of our humanity.

At a nation-state level, our information diet is a national security threat. Not in the way that the mainstream media or any of these other ridiculous sensemaking organizations say. They’re all focused on misinformation and disinformation - whatever that is - and making sure we listen to “the right people”. In a world where attention is power, controlling the Overton windows is the strongest way to accumulate both. They’re playing the same attention game as everyone else.

No, our information diet is a national security threat because of our willingness to ignore our own attention addictions. We are locked into our identity attachments. We no longer connect with humanity in our local communities or face-to-face with friends. Instead, we get our connection from joining a virtual crowd and decrying the other side, whatever the other side is. We refuse to recognize nuance and insist every problem is monocausal (and it’s the other side’s fault). We may not understand it, but we know in our dopamine-driven hearts that “our side” is the paragon of moral uprightness. Truth eludes us because we no longer seek it out. In a truthless world, politicians and autocrats and nation-states seek trust and attention instead.

In 2024, we have a consequential Presidential and Congressional election, a war in Europe, and a war in the Middle East. 2016 and 2020 were the Twitter elections, according to Katherine Boyle. 2024, she says, will be the first meme election. “Online and offline are finally merging.”

meme election

She’s right. And all of this is wrong. And since we’re talking about culpability and forgiveness and humility, now’s the time when I say I am a part of the problem too. We all are.

There’s a brilliant quote from novelist Stephen Chobsky: ”We accept the love we think we deserve.” It’s so striking because it says something about the internal value of love. About the nature of ourselves, our identity, and how we as individuals react to love.

In our present moment, we can adapt the quote to say: ”We accept the systems we think we deserve.” Social media is the system we think we deserve.

Our humanity is called to something more: something stronger, more personal. We deserve systems and culture that provides more connection than the shallow ties we have now. We deserve systems that don’t compress reality into a one-sided box. By practicing forgiveness, we can bridge the divides our hyper-connected world has paradoxically created. By embracing humility, we can resist the false certainties that our compressed media landscape encourages.

Offline and online are merging and they’re merging fast. It’s not enough to demand change from the systems while we’re in their thrall. We need to demand change from ourselves. By practicing forgiveness, we can transcend the division our hyper-connected world has paradoxically created. By embracing humility, we can resist the false certainties that our compressed media landscape demands. Until we are willing to change our habits and to demonstrate it, the temperature in all the rooms won’t change. The idea of truth will recede away from us at doppler-shifted speed. And the human connection we all desperately seek will remain vapid and vacuous.

It’s up to us.

legible

Footnote: Information Growth

Take these with a grain of salt, but at least the OOMs seem reasonable. Here’s our average daily consumption:

table1

And how about the amount of content available to us? That’s even crazier.

table3

Footnote: Quid est veritas? (What is Truth?)

It’s important to note that the idea of truth is more complicated than we think about. Truth has been weaponized by all the same influence-warriors as an emotion and identity tool to spear their influence-enemies.

Balaji has rightly pointed out that truth is a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum we have “technical truths” and on the other we have “political truths”. In Balaji’s words:

“A political fact is true if enough other people believe it to be true; for example, who the president is or where the border of a country is… If you can install software to enough people’s brains, you can change those truths. That is social consensus.Then, on the other side, some things are purely technical. A technical fact is the result of an equation or the diameter of a virus under an electron microscope—the result of physical constants. What people think does not change technical truth. Physical facts are independent of any human being.”

One of the most difficult tasks is determining where on this spectrum ideas and “truths” lie, and where people advocate for them to lie. If you control enough political truths, you successfully control the Overton window. You define reality and what opinions can be expressed. Nothing more Orwellian than that.