escaping abilene paradoxes and the future of the public square
is society succumbing to delusion or waking up from it?
many (like gatopal™ jd) have opined that we live in a truly delusional time.
but is it especially delusional? i’m not so sure.
certainly, our time is beset by delusion and intensely inhabited hallucination.
but does that make it unusual?
what if instead, the atypical aspect of right now lies not in our level of deludedness but rather in our ability to see and surface truth and thus to recognize delusion?
i have spoken in the past about abilene paradoxes, an odd state of affairs where a group of people almost all thinks “not X” but agrees to “X” because each person in the group thinks that all the others think “X” and fail the asch conformity test to stand up for their real thoughts, knuckling under to the crowd and presuming themselves to be somehow defective or an outlier.
this is the power of gaslighting. it’s also the power of message control, information shaping, and censorship. it’s why small groups whipped up into righteous frenzy or svengalian manipulation can cow large groups into silence and acquiescence. it’s why the attacks on those who speak against narrative must be so vicious, so unrelenting, and must to seem to come from all angles at once, backed by office and credential, inescapable and omnipresent.
in the end, the only way to make large groups of people do what they well and truly do not want to do is to get them to act like they believe things that they do not actually believe.
and the only way to do that is to make them think that everyone else believes these things so that they bow to a false consensus and get in line.
a faux collective consciousness begets a society whose axis mundi is lies that everyone knows are lies but that none dare question.
it deceives, demoralizes, and deranges the place where civilization, society, and shared morality once stood bending it into a funhouse horror that none recognize but all fear to reject.
it engenders an acquiescent nation of alienation.
and that is the end of everything.
it is the collective performance of these absurdist tenets that keeps the others inside the fence, rendering us the wardens of one another in some sort of society scale prison experiment: each and all terrified that those around them may be the thought police and unable to find fellowship for fear of visits from the intellectual stasi or of being morally and socially isolated or ostracized or deemed stupid or defective.
“everyone seems to think this but me, there must be something wrong with me.”
(i suspect this playbook is especially successful on “intellectuals” because they so desperately fear not been seen as “au courant” or “in the know” while being so dependent upon tribal membership to have access to tenure and publication.)
you cannot accomplish this sort of subjugation even with violence. that’s too obvious, too limited, and it either breaks a society entirely or results in violent backlash. you have to make the society believe that it is its own idea to act as it does. and in the case of tenets no one really likes, you can only do that if you prevent society from knowing its own mind.
this is why those with entrenched power are warring so hard over search engines, media, social media, journals, accreditation, and the coming informational access ramps of AI. it’s why they desperately need to suppress true community.
they actually care more about what you think that everyone else thinks than what you yourself think because THAT is what keeps you quiescent.
it does not have to be plausible, reasonable, or even sane.
they just need you to think that everyone else thinks it in order to incarcerate you in their intellectual gulag, blinded by the gaslights, unable to see the truth that you are not alone.
but they are losing. bigly.
the hilarity of woke AI turned google’s grand reveal into a pratfall for the ages. it was so bad it was not even laughable. it was piteous. mistrust is blooming like a springtime of flowers.
the (at least partial) liberation of twitter/X has upset so many because it breaks the abilene prison. too many are speaking now. too many crowd the dance floor. the dam breaks, and society comes back into knowing of its own mind and rediscovers its own beliefs as friend recognizes likeminded friend and thus the perception of world changes dragging the actual world inexorably behind it.
the people who were fired from twitter were not there to make it run. they were there to break it. they came from an entire scrabble game of three letter agencies. twitter was not even media, it was manipulation and it got so blatant during covid that everyone saw behind the curtain. you can have no perception of variance without a control set. and now the differences are visible.
fakebook, instaspam, and others are cast in stark relief as the sterile censorious slag heaps they always were. they fade. media fades. the washpo, the la times, CNN, MSNBC, they all fade and they die. google looks to be next. they have nothing to offer and this is now laid plain by one agora where the facts are, if imperfect, at least more plain, where story becomes swarm sourced, not spoon fed by the select few.
most of history has worked like that. you’ve seen how distorted facts about very simple things have been of late. what happened jan 6th? what was happening in hospitals from covid? is that laptop real? what did the russians do? what shall we believe about this disease and its source? about climate? about wars and their causes, their courses, their morality or meaning?
do you really believe this was ever any different before? that in a time of only a few papers and later radio and TV that you were getting truth and not projection, searchlights instead of gaslights?
many claim that without hearst and the other “yellow journalists” egging it on, there never would have even been a spanish american war. when you read the history and see the desire to sell papers because “war is good for circulation” and the wild stories from embedded journos playing at warmonger, it’s not even implausible. honestly, i suspect it’s at least mostly correct.
how many more of these have there been in times when information came only from a select few and no one who did not buy ink by the barrel could really mount a competing narrative?
how much of the history that you “know” is fake?
so again, do we really inhabit an age of delusion or is this what it feels like to finally start to recover from one?
is this delusion new, or is the fact that we can finally see it the novel aspect of our times?
is the wild shrillness of those exposed and their histrionic broken-brain squalling and moral opprobrium some new-new thing or just the predictable doubling down and intensification of belief that all cults experience when others point out that the world did not end last tuesday as the prophesies foretold?
because i think it’s mostly the latter.
in a just society of free people, government should have no power to delimit the speech of we the people. it is we the people who should delimit and proscribe the shrilling jingoism and self-interest espoused by the state.
they ought be the ones to shut up, not us.
and i think this is why the “permanent state” of justice, intelligence, and technocracy is so roiled and rapacious just now. they know they are in a fight for their lives, a fight for the soul of a society. they either keep control of the information streams or they go the way of the dodo.
do not expect them to go quietly.
and this is why, despite the progress made, we need to start planning the next steps in the evolution of our informational substrate.
the open agora of the public square is too important to be trusted to anyone so we must evolve to a system that is not run by anyone. we must move to protocols not companies, swarm source not server farm, encryption and validation, not open and vulnerable data.
the problem with these ideas is metcalf’s law: the value of a network is the square of its nodes. this makes the big, existing networks like twitter all but impossible to compete with. you cannot just “move to mammoth.” there’s no one there, it’s not where the debate (or the value) is.
interestingly, i think elon sees this. his first foray into “pay to subscribe and let me kick these advertisers out of here” has been a challenge. people are just not used to doing this. they are too used to being product instead of being customers. but ultimately, they should not be either. they should be stakeholders.
to do this and move to real, open source strong encrypted protocol driven distributed social media will make the internet ours. it will render it opaque to intrusive analysis and imposition. it will run on reputation, not regulation. it will render the very idea of censorship impossible and anachronistic. it will create such a vast sea of strong encrypted traffic that the stenography alone will make it all by impossible to see what anyone is doing, to tell a cat meme from a stock market transaction.
and i suspect (if he’s smart) that this is why elon wants to move to twitter as a payment system: because that is a business model that can thrive in a distributed swarm sourced world without walled gardens.
it’s also a business model so subversive and likely to anger the powers that be by placing information, communication, money, commerce, and the lifeblood of a society beyond the reach of leviathan that if you want to pull it off, you’d better have your own internet network and maybe even your own rockets to launch it into space.
hey, wait a minute…
this is where i think the future is going. the paths lead there inevitably because they must lead there. if they do not, then the public square will not be ours and only a society that can know its own mind and surface truth rather than accept if from the top down can escape the jingoistic jungle of state against populace infowar.
we cannot ultimately rely upon a nation or a company to secure our liberation.
we must become our own guarantors, stop clutching mommy, and become adults.
the incandescent brightness of this future will draw us out of this dark age and into something far, far better:
a world of consenting stakeholders able to stand upon their own.
self-sufficient, not subservient.
ungoverned and ungovernable.
I think going along to get along is a big part of it. People are fearful to speak their minds. I do think many people are still under a delusion. Some are apathetic. Others just want to get on with their lives and pretend like things are normal, which in some ways I can't say I blame them. I never thought I would see such powerful propaganda brainwash so many minds. That's hard to come back from. With the vaccines, people are afraid to speak out because most of the population took them. The people who took them don't want to hear about it. The people who didn't take them are not allowed to talk about it. They are immediately met with vitriol. Then we have war on multiple fronts. People don't know what to believe. When you've been continuously lied to, you can't take anything at face value. Hence, the demoralization. I guess that's the point.
The night is darkest before the dawn. We must stop self censoring in real life and keep shouting truth on the interwebs. Subscription revenue is the true subversive business model, delivering freedom from demoralizing agendas.