The Disinformation Age

The Disinformation Age

In preparing my lecture for my upcoming course I have an early slide called Modern Economy. It depicts the ages of mankind from Hunter/Gatherer to Agrarian to the Industrial Age to the Information Era to what has been called the Connection Economy (which is euphemism for social media). I am watching the documentary called The Social Dilemma and it describes a state of development in social engineering through online social media manipulation that makes the subliminal messaging warned about in Putney Swope seem like child’s play. There was a great analogy to the invention of the bicycle that suggests that every new invention changes life as we know it and that creates the basis for suggesting that social media is just the latest change agent and not something dramatically new. But these brilliant Silicon Valley social engineering entrepreneurs say this is different this time. They argue that nothing has gone through the capacity growth of a Trillion-X like digital computational power has. And nothing like the bicycle, the car, the airplane, the TV or even the cell phone operates on the same terms as that which makes humans different from the other animals, the ability to function cognitively. Only Artificial Intelligence is already functioning faster than the human brain can process data.

Of course, that means we are into Terminator territory where the machines are positioned to take over. Except instead of humans building human-killing robots, its about humans building technology to “checkmate humanity” as they say in the documentary. We all know since Kellyanne Conway articulated it on the White House lawn that we live in the era of alternative facts. Forget about Donald J. Trump for a moment and recognize that we have moved into an era when everyone lives in their own reality and that that reality reinforces their views in extremis. The example used in the documentary is for us to type into Google, “Climate Change is…” and recognize that everyone who Googles that gets a different answer depending on what Google’s biased algorithms says you are most inclined to want to hear. It has nothing to do with the truth, but rather to do with feeding you the fake news that is most profitable for the social media powers to promote. This is the conspiracy theory of all conspiracy theories.

In fact, if I were intro writing science fiction, I would write a Matrix in a Matrix in a Matrix and so on and so on. Life is truly imitating art. Only no one knows the ending to this story because no one knows which forces are doing the manipulation and whose reality is dominating the scene. The whole debate becomes about what is true and there are simply no trusted arbiters of the truth left in the world that can be seen by all sides as unbiased. That is a scary place to find ourselves. These documentarians are suggesting that technology is not the existential savior we have always believed it to be (through productivity), but rather the existential threat that brings about the Apocalypse. Of course, the confusion of “simultaneous utopia and dystopia” that technology presents is a challenge that suggests that we had better find leadership that can understand the power of this technology and how to regulate and/or control it.

This thought-provoking documentary forces the ultimate thought that the world had better reorient its economic incentives quickly to force us to drive ourselves not by the shareholder value of the disinformation economy (need I remind us that the tech companies now dominate the stock market, which dominates the economy, which dominates the world and the people of the world). When asked if he thinks we can make the changes to the technology and the system overall that can change the direction of the data-driven dilemma, the key interviewee, Tristan Harris, simply ends the documentary by saying. “We have to.”

The funny thing is that when we think of bad places in the world, we think of countries run by autocrats that want to control the population in a manner that has no room for the democratizing power of the internet or social media. We all know that the Arab Spring was driven by social media. So, China, North Korea, Russia and its remaining satellites like Belarus, the Middle Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries closely aligned thereto, Sudan, and, of course, Egypt, are all inclined to not allow unrestricted use of the internet and social media. How ironic that we have evolved from the internet as a symbol of information freedom to now worrying about social media as the axis of evil intent. It becomes doubly ironic when you start thinking that perhaps the single biggest reason why social media has taken on this parlor is a direct result of the underhanded efforts of those very totalitarian regimes which have recognized and feared the power that social media holds.

I have never been a conspiracy theorist and I have less concern about privacy than most people. I don’t care that Google owns Nest and that my home temperature leanings are data fodder for behavioralists in Silicon Valley. But when I come to understand that the data personalization efforts have gone so far as to force the divide that we all feel every day in this country, I too start to wonder whether the forces of Silicon Valley have purposefully or maybe inadvertently sown the seeds of our own destruction. But being the instrument of demise is much different from being the perpetrator. That role does not seem to me to be owned by Facebook, Google, Apple and Twitter, but rather by Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-Un and Mohammed bin Salman.

It is a sad day when you start feeling that the world is being governed by the forces of evil instead of the forces for good. And yet, that seems more than likely where we are at the moment. It is hard for an optimist like me to succumb to the dark thoughts that these notions suggest, but the bright light of hope exists that fewer and fewer of those dark forces are able to hide in the shadows as they have for the past five years. Strangely enough, in addition to stalwart and dedicated journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, Rachel Maddow and Bob Woodward and others, forcing the light in, the natural world, ranging from viruses to natural disasters (hurricanes, derechos and wildfires) has forced more clarity on the world. At some point, disinformation dies of its own weight and we can expect the passing of the disinformation age in favor of our next generation of enlightenment.