"When We Walk Away From The Lying Machines"

One of my patrons sent me this substack by Margaret Killjoy, thinking it would ring my bell. He was right. Six years ago, I wrote here about how democracy is losing the war against computational propaganda. That was before generative AI democratized the technology of reality manipulation: the age of the deep fake. Also: this essay has one of the all-time great ledes:

AI might destroy civilization.

AI might destroy civilization, or at least the internet, but I don’t want to get your hopes up.

This piece emphasizes that we are at the end of an epistemic era and at the precipice of a new one:

This siloing of reality was already a problem, and it’s one that will only get worse as false images and videos become easier to produce and harder to detect. “Media literacy” is getting harder to train for. AI is improving faster than the public is learning to detect it. This siloing of reality is the problem I’ve been aware of for awhile, the one I hear people talking about. Right now, the problem is that we tend to believe what we see.

The next generations will, I believe, suffer from an essentially inverse problem.

A child born today will never experience a world in which there is any reason to believe that realistic images, video, or audio represent reality, or that a person wrote the words that they read. Instead of presuming any photo-realistic image (or credible-sounding audio) is real unless proven otherwise, they might simply assume that every image and text was generated by the monstrous lying machines that sit in warehouses just outside our cities and suck up all our water and power.

In 2009 -- seventeen years ago! -- I started writing about "crap detection" in an age where it is possible to ask any question any time anywhere and get a million answers, with no guarantee that any of them are accurate. In 2012, believing that more widespread social media literacy was the best defense against the tsunami of crap that dilutes useful info online, I published Net Smart: How to thrive Online. I taught a course based on the book and published a syllabus for other educators. It is evident by now that education and media literacy have failed to meet the challenge of digital bogosity.

When I taught digital journalism, I taught the Lippmann-Dewey Debate -- now a little more than a century old:

Lippmann was worried that within democracies public opinion based on citizens mental constructs, termed pseudo-environments was moulded by the media and a range of stereotypes, and that this made the public poor arbiters of good decision making. He argued that democracies would tend to be driven by emotional reactions rather than informed understanding. The media and lack of time and the constraints of language add to the complications.

Dewey's response to this was not to dismiss Lippmann's worries but to argue for a reframing of democracy. It should, in his view, be not just a political system but rather an interconnected organism through which the citizenry can participate in a democracy which is both a form of social cooperation and an ethical ideal.

If Americans are ignorant, Dewey argued, the remedy is to improve public education. If Americans are gullible, Dewey argued, the remedy is to improve journalism. A century later, facing epistemic challenges orders of magnitude more threatening than those triggered by the industrial revolution, it doesn't look like the institutions of public education are capable of rising to the challenge.