Recorded vs. Private
Our content becomes our identity.
This is Part 3 in a series on the changes that have made us into cyborgs.
The Content Generation
In 2019 The Sun UK published a poll on the top jobs wanted by kids age 6-17 years.
#1 was YouTuber
#2 was blogger or vlogger
#3 was musician
#4 was actor
#5 was filmmaker
The top 5 spots were all related to creating content. Spots 6-10 were the old, displaced standbys you would expect: doctor, athlete, teacher, writer, lawyer (maybe you didn’t expect that one). Lego did a similar study where kids ranked 5 professions: YouTuber, Teacher, Athlete, Musician, Astronaut. In both the US and the UK, YouTuber was #1. Astronaut came in last. (In China it was reversed by the way.)
We are all obsessed and surrounded with content. Everybody has their own niche YouTube channels that gives them the informational, educational, or comic outlet they want. For me, it’s woodworking tutorials. But our kids are no different! Their heroes are Mr Beast and Mark Rober and Dude Perfect. Bandwidth is free and everyone is creating content. There’s no limit to how small a niche can be and maintain an audience. Rule 34 of the internet referred to porn but today it applies to every topic.
It’s clear that kids are more naturally accustomed to this world having grown up in it. It’s not just consuming content, they’re more comfortable to creating it to too. As soon as they get phones they’re taking photos and videos and sharing them anywhere and everywhere. They are used to the state of being recorded.
At our usual beach spot during the summer, there’s a gap in the dunes with a little path back to the houses in town. Multiple times a day every single day we’re there we see groups of girls walk back and take turns posing. Then they hunch over the screen to post, swap phones, and repeat. And when they head back to their towels and chairs, they’re not ready to read or play games. They swap phones and compare who commented and which post gets the most likes. They relish showing off what they’ve recorded, almost as if it was a higher state of being.
This is the second big shift. It’s not just that we’re always connected to the world, it’s that we’re always feeding the world with new content. Recording is constant and exciting. We record everything, and the record is mostly permanent. The younger you are, the more normal this appears. The value of all this new content is huge, although it’s almost all consumed by the platforms themselves.
For the young creators, there is a darkside beyond bullying or porn. Kyle Kashuv was a survivor and student activist after the Parkland school shootings. He was accepted into Harvard and planned to attend after graduating high school. But then comments he said when he was 16 to a private online group became public. These were comments he said he made “in an attempt to be as extreme and shocking as possible.” This is something almost every teenager does at some point with some group of friends. But today it happens online or in text messages instead of face to face late one night at a buddies house.
Harvard rescinded his admission, and refused a meeting to hear his side of the story. In his words:
Harvard deciding that someone can’t grow, especially after a life-altering event like the shooting, is deeply concerning. If any institution should understand growth, it’s Harvard, which is looked to as the pinnacle of higher education despite its checkered past… But I don’t believe that. I believe that institutions and people can grow. I’ve said that repeatedly. In the end, this isn’t about me, it’s about whether we live in a society in which forgiveness is possible or mistakes brand you as irredeemable, as Harvard has decided for me.
This unforgiveness shifts our mindset and our approach to new ideas. Historian Niall Ferguson is helping found the new University of Austin in Texas. When asked why, he laments the environment that Ivy undergraduates live in today. He remembers the ridiculous and crazy things he used to spout off at Oxford. He had to “mess around with a lot of bad ideas, to figure out the good ones.”
That kind of environment is nearly impossible today for three reasons.
1. Preference Falsification
Abigail Shrier made enemies writing a book describing how clumps of teenage girls want to transition into boys. Whether her telling of this new phenomenon of transgender girls is accurate is not relevant. What is relevant is how demonized she became by having the audacity to point it out and give an explanation. Transgender activists declared her a transphobe and a TERF and the Twitter mob fell in line. Target removed her book from shelves and Amazon down-listed it and blocked advertising. (Don’t worry, here’s a direct link.)
Shrier gave a speech to a student group at Princeton - which had to be held off campus because of protests by the way - where she answered the chief question that most people have for her:
The question I get most often—the thing that most interviewers want to know, even when they’re pretending to care about more high-minded things—is: What’s it like to be so hated? I can only assume that’s what some of you rubberneckers want to know as well: What’s it like to be on a GLAAD black list? What’s it like to have top ACLU lawyers come out in favor of banning your book? What’s it like to have prestigious institutions disavow you as an alum? What’s it like to lose the favor of the fancy people who once claimed you as their own?
…If you’re here, you no doubt are familiar with at least some of the unpleasantness you encounter whenever you deviate from the approved script. So, again, what’s it like to be the target of so much hate? It’s freeing.
We live in a time when some of our thoughts and beliefs can’t be said out loud, lest the Mob choose the modern violence of cancellation. Shrier’s lesson is that once the Mob comes and the takedown occurs, the shackles can come off. Public vilification is a process of immolation, but the resulting phoenix may be the only truly independent thinking class left.
The social scientist Timur Kuran coined the phrase preference falsification in his book Private Truths, Public Lies. Kuran argues that vote by secret ballot is a critical way to manage conformist social pressures and understand the true desires in a group.
Preference falsification is also why Peter Thiel’s famous interview question is so provocative. When Thiel asks “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”, it’s really two questions: 1) what’s something interesting you believe and 2) how willing are you to publish your true beliefs?
When our default state is on the public record - as it seems to be today - we falsify our own preferences in public or we keep them to ourselves. Remaining silent is the soft version: I disagree with the Mob, but not enough to risk ridicule or backlash.
The risk of public opinion isn’t the worst of it. The real problem is that there’s no room to chew on bad ideas. Remember what Niall Ferguson said: he had to mess around with a lot of bad ideas to get the good ones. If our culture is unwilling to allow this kind of exploration - especially among young people at college - how can the ideas that already exist change, challenge each other, or do anything but intensify? Are we even capable of changing our minds?
2. Consensus
Joe Rogan was blasted in early 2022 for having some controversial guests on his podcast. Controversial guests aren’t exactly new on his podcast.. it’s actually half the point. He’s had on everyone from Edward Snowden to Alex Jones to Abigail Shrier to Bernie Sanders. But this time the Mob started marching and a lot of people got very angry at Joe Rogan. They claimed he was spreading ‘dangerous misinformation’ and leading to needless Covid deaths.
His sin: having Robert Malone and and Peter McCollough as guests. Both have some conspiratorial claims about Covid. He’s had more mainstream medical doctors Michael Osterholm and Sanjay Gupta from CNN as guests as well, but that did nothing to placate the Mob. He’s had far more conspiratorial guests too, like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson, but nobody seems to have a problem with his conversations with them either.
Rogan made a ‘non-apology’ video explaining his perspective and unpacking the idea that these episodes were dangerous misinformation:
Those episodes were labelled as being dangerous misinformation. The problem I have with the term misinformation especially today is that many of the things we thought of as misinformation just a short while ago are now accepted as fact. For instance, 8 months ago if you said ‘if you get vaccinated and you catch Covid you can still spread Covid’ you would be removed from social media. They would ban you from certain platforms. Now that’s accepted as fact. If you said ‘I don’t think cloth masks work’ you would be banned from social media. Now that is repeatedly stated on CNN. If you said ‘it’s possible that Covid-19 came from a lab’ you’d be banned from many platforms. Now that’s on the cover of Newsweek. All of those theories that at one point in time were banned were openly discussed by those two men on my podcast that were accused of being dangerous information.
Covid-19 has demonstrated the media’s capacity and willingness to ban information around subjects it deems dangerous to public health. They’ve gotten it wrong many times and suppressed ideas that turned out to be right. The point Rogan makes is: what makes you so sure you’re right this time?
It’s easy to forget just how much the speed of information has changed. Last year, Juneteenth became a federal holiday for the first time. It celebrates the very end of slavery when, on June 19th 1865, Union General Granger landed at Galveston, Texas to enforce the emancipation of all slaves in Texas. The Emancipation Proclamation occurred on January 1, 1863. It took 18 months for news and enforcement to travel across the United States and reach the southern reaches of Texas.
The speed has kept on increasing. First, the telegram took off. Then the telephone. Then radio and television and FAX machines and computers. Communication made the 20th century look nothing like the one before it. And now in the 21st century, social media has democratized the change completely. Almost anyone in the world can talk at or with anyone else, anytime, for free.
Brian Eno coined the term scenius to counteract the idea of a genius toiling alone. He argued that certain settings and groups of people can actually work together to generate genius. Genius clumps. He has plenty of examples to highlight, from The Inklings in Oxford (which included both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien) to the Renaissance art of 15th century Florence. When scenius is at work there’s a network effect and an exciting, rapid exchange of information, tools, and techniques. This kind of interaction drives our view of the world. It builds consensus. Our social brains feed off of relationships to reinforce ideas and patterns.
We have a new and different kind of scenius today. It’s on the internet - a part of Kevin Kelly’s Technium - and damned if it isn’t every connected human. This global scenius has new emergent properties, defined by speed and virality and memes. Memes travel further and faster than ever before and the algorithms boost or reduce signal. If you know how to manufacture attention, you can reach thousands. Or millions.
The raw speed at which we arrive at consensus today has changed how we derive truth. It happens faster than ever - in weeks or days or even hours. It’s measured by audience size instead of by relationships and small groups like most of human history. A meme needs a carrier like an expert opinion and a big enough audience. Once it uses its carrier to spread - like the idea that Covid-19 was passed to humans from bats in a wet market - it becomes near impossible to refute.
In a smaller group, you can voice a different idea, even a heretical one. You take a shot and see what happens. Maybe you take it on the chin sometimes. With just a few people the social conventions are different and it’s not so bad. Ironically, this is why Joe Rogan has an audience of millions. He and his guests are willing to kick around ideas as part of an intimate conversation. As he said, “I’m not trying to be controversial. I’ve never tried to do anything with these podcasts except have interesting conversations.”
Once a consensus has reached a large enough audience, it becomes tribal and crowds out any upstart ideas. The audience has adopted it and made it theirs. The weight of all that humanity means any new idea starts deep underwater starved of any consideration.
After all, who can disagree with an idea that has millions of likes?
3. Identity
In his book Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm made the following point:
‘Ask an average newspaper reader what he thinks about a certain political question. He will give you as “his” opinion a more or less exact account of what he has read [in the papers], and yet – and this is the essential point – he believes that what he is saying is the result of his own thinking.’
Humans are pattern seeking mammals. We take the data we have to make sense of the world. Until this generation, information spread so slowly that the number of opinions we owned as “ours” was severely limited by the amount of information we could ingest.
But now the firehose is wide open. There is content everywhere, produced by everyone, and available always. The smallest niche interest you can imagine has an audience measured in the thousands. If you don’t believe me, go subreddit spelunking. Hell, I used to think woodworking was a niche hobby before I got into it. The woodworking subreddit has 4 million members.
Paul Graham wrote one of the most important essays of the 21st century called Keep Your Identity Small. Politics and religion, he says, are subjects in which people can feel comfortable having strong convictions with very little expertise. The more entangled a topic is in your identity, the less capable you become of understanding it or changing your mind. In his words, “the more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”
I remember reading this essay soon after it came out and having a really hard time with it. I’m a programmer! A racing driver! A contrarian! A Catholic! Surely these things can’t be bad! But they were. They were holding my life back artificially. Programming was a thing I did (mediocrely) and I was so attached to the idea that it took a long time for me to realize that what I actually liked was creating products. The huge amount of time I spent racing cars kept me in a holding pattern socially. When I realized that being contrarian was just a symptom of the kind of thinkers I idolized, I started to better understand the value of first principles thinking. And religion? I’m still very much Catholic, but backing away from my faith multiple times has made it more concrete.
Paul is right: the more labels you have, the dumber they make you.
The number of labels we carry has exploded. And we are so much dumber.
Speaking of labels, go look at Twitter profiles sometime. It’s as if people can sum things up in a few words: Democrat. Republican. He/Him. Entrepreneur. Nomad. Texan. Climate. Bitcoin. Freedom. Socialism. Trump!
What Twitter profiles really tell you is not the type of person you are, but the type of person you listen to.
The internet today is all about audience. Identity doesn’t describe who you are. It describes who you are willing to let influence you’re thinking. This is an ongoing fundamental shift. Back in the 1930s when Erich Fromm made his point about newspaper readers, there were only a handful of newspapers. The media managed the general shape of your opinion and you got to fill in the blanks with some color. Identities have become more rigid and more polarized because we live in a world of information abundance! Content is so narrowly focused that you can find exactly the voices you agree with and tune out everything else. It’s easy to outsource all of your labels to the people you listen to. If your identity
is online then it’s more hackable by anyone trying to build an audience. The better they are at grabbing your attention, the more their worldview will pervade the world.
We are in the middle of a huge popularity contest, with memes as weapons, and it’s shaping the future of our thought and belief.