Well constructed essay. Should be in a compilation “Best-of Substack” - you hit all the right notes.
There’s the fantasy that “the truth wants to be free”. It gives the impression that if you sit still truth will naturally, of its own accord somehow, fly from an abyss and attach itself to your mind. It naturally emerges from a chaos of infinite falsehood, a sort of shy woodland creature.
It’s like believing that out of a myriad of possible configurations of molecules in a glass of water, it’s possible for it to spontaneously organize into a crystalline ice cube at room temperature. Possible but not probable. Actually, it takes tremendous energy to remove heat from the glass until crystalline water emerges.
The reality is that a truth or fact has only a single model while falsehoods are of infinite variety.
Civilization has expended vast amounts of energy to remove falsehoods from descriptions of reality, through various processes of science, education, economics, journalism, democracy. Inspection and editing you might say.
Our conception of the world crystallized over centuries - we are made of cells; nature is hundreds of millions of years old; economies are built on supply and demand; knowledge is critical to flourishing. These and millions of other ideas are a model of reality, what we distilled and crystallized over millennia.
When we put an ice cube in a bath of water, it melts. Crystal of salt dissolves. It absorbs the randomness around it until it no longer exists. You can insulate and cool the ice, requiring effort, and preserve it indefinitely, as long as you can make the effort.
The magic of internet is that it bathes ordinary people who have an instilled knowledge and experience of reality, the world, in a boiling broth of competing ideas, mostly false. 200 years ago we were relatively insulated by slow books, magazines and newspapers. Then came radio which diffused ideas faster, turning up the temperature. Then TV, then the internet, then the iPhone.
We have mental alarm systems - fright, anger, fear, curiosity when we face ideas which conflict with our understanding. It’s contrast and conflict which gains attention, since we seek to preserve what we can predict and avoid costly or deadly surprises.
This immersion in the bath of falsehoods which is internet is slowly (or rapidly) dissolving any coherency of idea and creating perpetual mental exhaustion from alarm signals. We (can) spend vast amount mental time and energy to edit and sort what’s real and what’s not.
The basis for monetizing internet is via creating perpetual exhaustive surprise - the bath of falsehoods. It’s the logical extension of the newspaper idea “if it bleeds it leads”. I just call it a cesspool of melancholy - social media. It’s the first law of the internet - find what disturbs people most and charge them for reading it while asking them to tell all their “friends”.
The second feature of the bath of falsehoods is that through unlimited zero-cost publishing, it attracts people who enjoy making falsehoods specifically to upset others to gain attention. And by law 1, gain money. It’s a world of Infowars and Q-Anon, the collapse of journalism into the now quaint idea of clickbait. These are the trolls, and the moment a new medium crops up, Trolls colonize until the noise-to-information ratio is unsupportable.
Usenet, in the 80’s was interesting for a while. It was the precursor to all social media we see today, and the blueprint for trolling. The question is not if a communications channel becomes inhabited by trolls, it’s only how much money will be expended to remove them and prevent meltdown. “X” is going through late phase internet collapse. Facebook is forcibly ejecting trolling to survive. I call it the 2nd law of internet: a Suppuration of Trolls always crops up to corrupt the value of communication on a given medium. It’s always just a question of how much money can be spent to prevent them how long….
Another feature of internet/iPhone communication is that it is designed to seem, well, natural. User-friendly. Easy. Just like talking to someone. It’s only like talking to someone in the sense that your conversation is recorded, dated and indexed, named entities and ideas are mechanically extracted and sorted out, linked to you and sold to the highest bidder. In turn they are used to identify concepts which will cause consternation the most effectively since that attracts attention, and attention is required to sell ads.
Not only is your conversation recorded, but it is amassed into a stupefying compendium of all conversations irrespective of truth, only judged by the ability to garner attention through evoking ire. Nobody uses the collected letters of Jane Doe to do algorithmic information selection and selective troll exposure. Nobody has figured out how to monetize post-its and chit-chats at a bar or beach. But the illusory requirement of only being able to talk to other humans via the iPhone/internet is quite something else.
The humor in it all is that the biggest “social network” of them all - Google - understood that anything you transmit “electronically” (a euphemism for perpetual digital recordings) can and will be used against you in exactly the worst way and most vulnerable time. Do read about Google’s “destruction of communications” in their current anti-trust saga.
I call that the 3rd Law - Recordings not Conversations. And the recordings will be used at the worst possible times by (2) Trolls to garner controversy in supports of (1) the Cesspool of Melancholy. It’s quite the system but it needs one more gadget to make it infernal.
Transmitting ideas used to be so slow! Ideas from Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” took a century to diffuse and become part of established fact about the natural world, and it was not without massive resistance. Great effort was expended showing that there was no other viable explanation for the facts on the ground. Editing out falsehoods gradually crystallized the truth of evolution, and there were really only one or two challengers.
All living humans came from exactly one male called a man and one female called a woman, contributing sperm and ova respectively, a dual role in sex we might call “binary”. While obvious today, that took quite some time to figure out - we are made of cells, there are two special cells made exclusively by men or women which fuse and create a baby, the sex of the baby is determined at conception by the chromosomes in the sperm cell, and so on. It took millennia to eject ideas like phases of the moon, prayers, food, or other curious beliefs about what determines sex.
It took perhaps 10-20 years for delusional falsehoods to be created and spread about sex - “not a binary” - at sufficient speed that ordinary science couldn’t edit the information from itself as a model of the world. The iPhone sped that up even more, so that an ordinary falsehood spread by trolls for attention - vaccines cause widespread disease; a political party created hurricanes - spread so rapidly that the energy required to edit them from models of reality for most people is overwhelming. Noise costs nothing to create, now costs nothing to spread at light speed, and the more controversial and idiotic the message the faster it spreads.
I call it the 4th law of internet, falsehoods spread with demonic speed, truth is glacial. Falsehoods are given a lava-like nature with an amazing fluidity which melts human reason faster than it can be crystallized around fact.
So that’s the system.
1) Cesspool of Melancholy fed from a
2) Suppuration of Trolls using
3) Recordings, not Conversations at
4) Demonic speed
The iPhone was inevitable, as the world moves digital. Humans like hand-sized tools - paperbacks, pocket knives, watch, keys, cup - and putting a computer in hand was always a matter of when.
Using networked information (internet) is a choice, and not inevitable.
Reich and his ilk, even if that becomes their messaging, all they will really do is double the size of government, suffocating the economy even more, while flooding the country with 100mil young men, destabilizing everything. The left is in pure cosmological destroyer mode, incapable of anything else.
On the one hand the internet has been fundamentally destabilizing. For a few of us though, it has been like tapping into the noosphere, consciousness expanding.
Great post. That dopamine is powerful stuff, isn't it? It's also why I don't gamble anymore.
Beware of Democrats like Reich. They said the same thing in the late 80s and early 90s, and we got Bill Clinton. They said it again in the 2000s, and we got Obama. Nothing fundamentally changed either time.
Reich has put his finger on the issue, but thinks the Democrats can get away with making nice noises and running charismatic, folksy candidates. What we need is a sincere Populist party, with the usual allowances for human and bureaucratic corruption. If the Dems can accomplish that, they might actually succeed in making the Republicans obsolete.
Great essay! Or is it an article? I never know what to call the things I read on Substack. This one is going in the archives. I also will share it with others who will appreciate it. Keep up the fire! 🔥💯🔥
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a vain effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No you can’t camp in this city. No you can’t shit in our streets. No you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bond to rob and murder again.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
Well constructed essay. Should be in a compilation “Best-of Substack” - you hit all the right notes.
There’s the fantasy that “the truth wants to be free”. It gives the impression that if you sit still truth will naturally, of its own accord somehow, fly from an abyss and attach itself to your mind. It naturally emerges from a chaos of infinite falsehood, a sort of shy woodland creature.
It’s like believing that out of a myriad of possible configurations of molecules in a glass of water, it’s possible for it to spontaneously organize into a crystalline ice cube at room temperature. Possible but not probable. Actually, it takes tremendous energy to remove heat from the glass until crystalline water emerges.
The reality is that a truth or fact has only a single model while falsehoods are of infinite variety.
Civilization has expended vast amounts of energy to remove falsehoods from descriptions of reality, through various processes of science, education, economics, journalism, democracy. Inspection and editing you might say.
Our conception of the world crystallized over centuries - we are made of cells; nature is hundreds of millions of years old; economies are built on supply and demand; knowledge is critical to flourishing. These and millions of other ideas are a model of reality, what we distilled and crystallized over millennia.
When we put an ice cube in a bath of water, it melts. Crystal of salt dissolves. It absorbs the randomness around it until it no longer exists. You can insulate and cool the ice, requiring effort, and preserve it indefinitely, as long as you can make the effort.
The magic of internet is that it bathes ordinary people who have an instilled knowledge and experience of reality, the world, in a boiling broth of competing ideas, mostly false. 200 years ago we were relatively insulated by slow books, magazines and newspapers. Then came radio which diffused ideas faster, turning up the temperature. Then TV, then the internet, then the iPhone.
We have mental alarm systems - fright, anger, fear, curiosity when we face ideas which conflict with our understanding. It’s contrast and conflict which gains attention, since we seek to preserve what we can predict and avoid costly or deadly surprises.
This immersion in the bath of falsehoods which is internet is slowly (or rapidly) dissolving any coherency of idea and creating perpetual mental exhaustion from alarm signals. We (can) spend vast amount mental time and energy to edit and sort what’s real and what’s not.
The basis for monetizing internet is via creating perpetual exhaustive surprise - the bath of falsehoods. It’s the logical extension of the newspaper idea “if it bleeds it leads”. I just call it a cesspool of melancholy - social media. It’s the first law of the internet - find what disturbs people most and charge them for reading it while asking them to tell all their “friends”.
The second feature of the bath of falsehoods is that through unlimited zero-cost publishing, it attracts people who enjoy making falsehoods specifically to upset others to gain attention. And by law 1, gain money. It’s a world of Infowars and Q-Anon, the collapse of journalism into the now quaint idea of clickbait. These are the trolls, and the moment a new medium crops up, Trolls colonize until the noise-to-information ratio is unsupportable.
Usenet, in the 80’s was interesting for a while. It was the precursor to all social media we see today, and the blueprint for trolling. The question is not if a communications channel becomes inhabited by trolls, it’s only how much money will be expended to remove them and prevent meltdown. “X” is going through late phase internet collapse. Facebook is forcibly ejecting trolling to survive. I call it the 2nd law of internet: a Suppuration of Trolls always crops up to corrupt the value of communication on a given medium. It’s always just a question of how much money can be spent to prevent them how long….
Another feature of internet/iPhone communication is that it is designed to seem, well, natural. User-friendly. Easy. Just like talking to someone. It’s only like talking to someone in the sense that your conversation is recorded, dated and indexed, named entities and ideas are mechanically extracted and sorted out, linked to you and sold to the highest bidder. In turn they are used to identify concepts which will cause consternation the most effectively since that attracts attention, and attention is required to sell ads.
Not only is your conversation recorded, but it is amassed into a stupefying compendium of all conversations irrespective of truth, only judged by the ability to garner attention through evoking ire. Nobody uses the collected letters of Jane Doe to do algorithmic information selection and selective troll exposure. Nobody has figured out how to monetize post-its and chit-chats at a bar or beach. But the illusory requirement of only being able to talk to other humans via the iPhone/internet is quite something else.
The humor in it all is that the biggest “social network” of them all - Google - understood that anything you transmit “electronically” (a euphemism for perpetual digital recordings) can and will be used against you in exactly the worst way and most vulnerable time. Do read about Google’s “destruction of communications” in their current anti-trust saga.
I call that the 3rd Law - Recordings not Conversations. And the recordings will be used at the worst possible times by (2) Trolls to garner controversy in supports of (1) the Cesspool of Melancholy. It’s quite the system but it needs one more gadget to make it infernal.
Transmitting ideas used to be so slow! Ideas from Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” took a century to diffuse and become part of established fact about the natural world, and it was not without massive resistance. Great effort was expended showing that there was no other viable explanation for the facts on the ground. Editing out falsehoods gradually crystallized the truth of evolution, and there were really only one or two challengers.
All living humans came from exactly one male called a man and one female called a woman, contributing sperm and ova respectively, a dual role in sex we might call “binary”. While obvious today, that took quite some time to figure out - we are made of cells, there are two special cells made exclusively by men or women which fuse and create a baby, the sex of the baby is determined at conception by the chromosomes in the sperm cell, and so on. It took millennia to eject ideas like phases of the moon, prayers, food, or other curious beliefs about what determines sex.
It took perhaps 10-20 years for delusional falsehoods to be created and spread about sex - “not a binary” - at sufficient speed that ordinary science couldn’t edit the information from itself as a model of the world. The iPhone sped that up even more, so that an ordinary falsehood spread by trolls for attention - vaccines cause widespread disease; a political party created hurricanes - spread so rapidly that the energy required to edit them from models of reality for most people is overwhelming. Noise costs nothing to create, now costs nothing to spread at light speed, and the more controversial and idiotic the message the faster it spreads.
I call it the 4th law of internet, falsehoods spread with demonic speed, truth is glacial. Falsehoods are given a lava-like nature with an amazing fluidity which melts human reason faster than it can be crystallized around fact.
So that’s the system.
1) Cesspool of Melancholy fed from a
2) Suppuration of Trolls using
3) Recordings, not Conversations at
4) Demonic speed
The iPhone was inevitable, as the world moves digital. Humans like hand-sized tools - paperbacks, pocket knives, watch, keys, cup - and putting a computer in hand was always a matter of when.
Using networked information (internet) is a choice, and not inevitable.
Reich and his ilk, even if that becomes their messaging, all they will really do is double the size of government, suffocating the economy even more, while flooding the country with 100mil young men, destabilizing everything. The left is in pure cosmological destroyer mode, incapable of anything else.
On the one hand the internet has been fundamentally destabilizing. For a few of us though, it has been like tapping into the noosphere, consciousness expanding.
Great post. That dopamine is powerful stuff, isn't it? It's also why I don't gamble anymore.
Beware of Democrats like Reich. They said the same thing in the late 80s and early 90s, and we got Bill Clinton. They said it again in the 2000s, and we got Obama. Nothing fundamentally changed either time.
IOW, it's the same lie now that it was then.
Reich has put his finger on the issue, but thinks the Democrats can get away with making nice noises and running charismatic, folksy candidates. What we need is a sincere Populist party, with the usual allowances for human and bureaucratic corruption. If the Dems can accomplish that, they might actually succeed in making the Republicans obsolete.
Great essay! Or is it an article? I never know what to call the things I read on Substack. This one is going in the archives. I also will share it with others who will appreciate it. Keep up the fire! 🔥💯🔥
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that children should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a vain effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow homelessness to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No you can’t camp in this city. No you can’t shit in our streets. No you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bond to rob and murder again.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
XXX