John Warner writes about how we’ve culturally shifted from valuing individual curation and criticism to preferring collective consensus:
One part of my theory is that across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfortable in its familiarity… Over time, we lose touch with our sense of taste, or in extreme examples that taste matters at all.
One part of my theory is that across many dimensions we have been acculturated to value the aggregated over the individual, and defaulting to the average consensus has become comfortable in its familiarity… Over time, we lose touch with our sense of taste, or in extreme examples that taste matters at all.
Ruby Justice Thelot identifies “para-content makers” — people who make content about content — as key shapers of narrative:
Para-content makers may be called “creators” or “influencers” but their actual role is that of “contextualizer”, the shapers of a cultural artifact’s horizon. […] The notable shift in our era of para-content is that the audience has fully abdicated the horizon-making to the “contextualizer”.
Ezra Klein observes (archive link) our desire for cultural consensus dominating criticism:
We’ve moved away from attaching to a curator who has an individual taste and guides you through the world toward the averaging out of curators like it’s a poll, right? Like, we treat everything as a poll and not as criticism.
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Peter Limberg notes how we put reality up to a popularity contest:
Today, we live under the myth of the meme, which suggests that if something goes viral, it must be true.
Joanna Kavenna riffs that “perhaps the most important event in 2024 was that reality became unreal.”
See also:
Truthwashing: vibes and scams all the way down
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L.M. Sacasas demonstrates how this same thought pattern plays out in the rise of LLMs to “write” for us:
When we turn to an LLM to write for us, we are also inviting it to undertake the more fundamental task of articulation…
[T]he labor of articulation itself shapes what we think and feel. Articulation is not dictation, articulation constitutes our perception of the world. To search for a word is not merely to search for a label, the search is interwoven with the very capacity to perceive and understand the thing, idea, or feeling.
See also: The siren call of LLMs
As fewer and fewer people read, and fewer and fewer people can read — American literacy rates are depressing — writing for a wide audience requires simplifying both text and content. Rob Horning writes about the anti-nuanced writing and communication that generative AI encourages:
“Generative AI seems to have been developed on the opposite principle: that cliches are more illuminating [than] less probable forms of communication… Every attempt at communication should be treated as trying to communicate one specific thing, and machinic decoders should be capable of saving us the time of working out what that one thing most likely is for any given piece of text.”
Jay argues that image generators are prompting an “Information Age Iconoclasm:”
Image generation doesn’t just alter how we make images, it alters what an image is, ontologically.
Generative outputs aren’t just more media, they represent one of the first truly computer-native mediums. And in doing so, they reframe the entire structure of originality and authorship.
They also undermine reality by making every image suspect.
Related reading:
AI Slop Is a Brute Force Attack on the Algorithms That Control Reality by Jason Koebler (404 Media)
All together, I see these pieces adding up to an avoidance of making our own decisions, exercising our own judgment, trusting our own interpretations. And, fair — we’re all overwhelmed, drowning in content.
We’re exposed to — and expected to form opinions on — a massive number of subjects and events, every day. And facts aren’t just facts anymore; we cannot even trust our eyes or our ears now that video and audio can be easily generated. This goes hand in hand with a cultural attack on elites, institutions, and education — the people and tools that could help us evaluate the quality of information. Statistics are used to lie, undermining the value of data in a world that reduces everything to data.
Mistrusting empiricism, and lacking the time and expertise to draw informed conclusions anyway, people turn to their tribes for guidance. This provides greater emotional certainty than deciphering the murky, conflicting data sources that so often describe reality. We like things to be explicable, we like them to be clear, we like them to be unambiguous, we like them to be consistent. Unfortunately, reality is usually complicated — as are people.
Further reading:
Mass Delusion, Inc. by Kennedy Chappell
See also:
Stories help us find truth, but there’s a difference between fact and fiction
Jay
