These days I have a sense of falling from a precipice toward a torrent of algorithmically driven slop. It’s coming, whether we want it or not, and the consequences for our communal life will be devastating.
It’s now seven years since Steve Bannon outlined his infamous strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” This, he said, was a way to “deal with” the media, whom he saw as the real enemies of MAGA. In practice, it has been a very effective method of censorship. With every important issue of the day, the “zone” of public discourse is immediately filled with a volume of competing narratives, often mendacious or misleading. It’s no longer necessary to suppress information. You just have to make the cost of sorting fact from fiction, in terms of time and effort, too high to pay for the …
These days I have a sense of falling from a precipice toward a torrent of algorithmically driven slop. It’s coming, whether we want it or not, and the consequences for our communal life will be devastating.
It’s now seven years since Steve Bannon outlined his infamous strategy to “flood the zone with shit.” This, he said, was a way to “deal with” the media, whom he saw as the real enemies of MAGA. In practice, it has been a very effective method of censorship. With every important issue of the day, the “zone” of public discourse is immediately filled with a volume of competing narratives, often mendacious or misleading. It’s no longer necessary to suppress information. You just have to make the cost of sorting fact from fiction, in terms of time and effort, too high to pay for the ordinary person, who can’t spend all day online weighing up competing claims about robots or pedophilia or Iran.
Generative AI now allows the production of disinformation at scale. The kind of influence ops we associate with Cambridge Analytica or the Russian Internet Research Agency can be conducted with unprecedented scope and sophistication: Thousands of fake people — tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands — making videos, posting in forums, astroturfing entire contexts in which people will live out their political lives. Couple this with the collapse of trust in all kinds of authority, and there is no one even to say what might distinguish “disinformation” from any other kind of data. [...]
The desire to return to consensus reality is hopelessly nostalgic. Yes, there are still hard limits: The “cloud” is a physical place, scooping out mountains for raw materials and venting heat and carbon dioxide out of gargantuan data centers; political power still grows out of the barrel of a gun. But the layer of the stack in which our subjectivities are formed, the place where our beliefs about the world are shaped, is also a battleground. We must teach ourselves to navigate the torrent that is replacing consensus reality, this turbulent, treacherous mediatized flow. There is no shore to swim back to, but in the new age of magic, when reality is labile and can be recoded by the power of signs, by narrative and memes and vibes and compelling images, art becomes a truly political technology. This is not art as critique. Critique is just sincere-posting, dutifully pointing out yet again that the Medbed isn’t “real.” Art can mess with our masters in ways we don’t yet fully understand. It makes culture. It is a transmitter of values. It is the lava out of which future realities will congeal.