Ted Gioia - in The honest broker
All digital communication is reverting back to primitive ways. The emoji is like the hieroglyphic. The meme is akin to the cave painting. The text message is a throwback to the telegraph.
So it’s no surprise that people are scrolling on their phones. I can almost hear the rustle of the papyrus.
Why do I see all these homemade videos of people talking into the camera while sitting alone in their cars?
They’re not even driving—just standing still. They’re literally going nowhere.
Is an empty automobile the new town square?
The appropriate metaphor for this: Public discourse is running on empty.
Alexander Graham Bell would be shocked. The phone is now a device you use to speak into the void. You talk to nobody at all.
But we still keep talking.
The most popular social media platforms will be those that allow people to avoid responsibility for what they say.
Every society has institutions of this sort. In ancient times, it was the bacchanalia. For us it is online shitposting and the burner account.
Consider the etymology of the word ‘dictator’—from the Latin dictare (which translates as ‘to say often’). It thus designates a person who talks obsessively—repeating the same thing over and over.
It’s curious that dictators aren’t defined by their deeds, merely their monotonous talk. The assertion of power through repetitive speaking eliminates the needs for listening, or (at an extreme) even for action.
But isn’t this the dominant model of communication in the current era?
Social media is thus the true dictatorship of the proletariat—contrary to what Marx thought.
If I ran Harvard or Oxford or Stanford, I’d create a large language model that only learned from my best scholars. People will soon decide that they prefer talking with the bot that has the narrowest and most exclusive range of inputs.
The AI overlords haven’t figured this out yet. They want the largest possible training sets for their bots.
They should instead emulate the great artists, who always grasp that their greatness depends on what they leave out.
If this is true of humans, it’s far more true for machines. You don’t want your doctor bot to go anywhere near Reddit.
Just imagine trying to convince the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders to root for the other team. That’s the precise state of political discourse today.
There are only two teams.
There will always be just two teams.
After you pick a team, you are assigned the role of cheerleader. (What did you expect? That they would make you a coach or a quarterback? Hah!)
All debate now morphs into a cheerleading competition. Nobody expects otherwise.
But it’s also pointless, pursued merely as a decorative ritual—because, even when the Cowboys have a failing team, their cheerleaders never switch sides.
If you try to pursue political discourse outside this ritual, you are in the worst possible situation. You are operating without a team—that’s the most despised situation of them all, and a weakness others will exploit mercilessly.
A side point: When I watch the Super Bowl, I can’t tell which team the announcers prefer.
This is the only sphere of American public discourse where that’s true.
If Aldous Huxley had known about endlessly scrolling short videos from a handheld device, he would have made it the preferred media interface of his Brave New World.
He wisely understood—unlike Orwell or Bradbury—that ruling elites don’t need censorship and book-burning if they can convince people to voluntarily abandon literacy.
At a certain point, people will want to have conversations again. People always crave what’s forbidden.
The person you’re talking to doesn’t exist.
That once meant you suffered from mental illness. Now it’s a sign of how up-to-date you are—you’ve gone high tech, and are getting phished or catfished or chatbotted or deepfaked or techno-manipulated in some other way.
Social media has replaced dialogue by chatter in an echo chamber. The most appropriate name for a platform of this sort would be Chatterbox.
Podcasting is the new stream of consciousness—long, rambling, freeform.
It is the closest thing to avant-garde that media has ever devised.
A new kind of author has appeared, never seen before in history. They hate writing, but still want to publish a book. So they have AI write a book for them—and attach their name to it.
This is absurd. You might as well hire somebody to go the gym and do your workout for you. And then hire someone else to go on a diet on your behalf.
I have no sympathy for the machines. Even so, I’d like to see an AI bot sue one of these human authors for plagiarism.
The response to cold machine-made discourse will be a return to elusive ways of communication.
The ancients respected the oracle at Delphi because it spoke in riddles.
Imagine having the power to make a declaration to the entire world. That’s such a fearsome thing—the responsibility it brings must be enormous.
Not long ago, nobody had that kind of platform. Even the President was censored in many countries (USSR, Cuba, etc.), and couldn’t really speak to the entire world.
Now everybody gets global access—just by opening a social media account. Your words now reach every part of the planet instantaneously. My cat photos arrive in Ultima Thule in a microsecond.
This has devalued public discourse to a degree inconceivable just a generation ago.
As a result, the way to create an aura of authority will soon be very different—you will achieve it via voluntary silence. The most respected public figures will be those who say the least.
In a negotiation, the person who speaks first is the loser.
Everything today is like a negotiation—at least in this regard. So even tough words express weakness.
I’m reminded of a former colleague who always brought an interpreter to overseas meetings, although he was fluent in the language. He didn’t require translation—but understood that appearing totally aloof from the conversation made him more formidable.
The words that signal strength now are increasingly the polite ones—because they are the least expected and most extravagant.
They are the luxury items of digital discourse, and hence the sources of highest status.
At least half of what’s published now must be AI-generated. And I expect that will soon rise to 90% or more.
But this will have the exact opposite effect of what AI purveyors expect.
They believe that AI will get embraced as smarter and more trustworthy than fallible humans. We will love our super-intelligent bots—they’re absolutely convinced of this.
But the actual result of AI slop flooding the culture will be disgust and distrust.
This disgust will only get worse, deepening into widespread repulsion, due to (1) the huge, overpowering size of the slop tsunami, which drowns out all human effort; (2) the total lack of transparency—they always try to hide the AI origins of the slop; and (3) the widespread use of this tech for scams, marketing, propaganda, and deceit.
So it doesn’t matter how smart AI is. It doesn’t matter how well-spoken.
Even if it’s authoritative, it will be a hated authority—like some kind of evil schoolmaster.
People will soon crave the human voice. But even that won’t be enough.
They will want to see the flesh-and-blood human in front of them—because even voices can’t be trusted anymore. Speakers will want to look each other in the eyes and maybe even embrace.
We will return to the origins of the word testify—to bear witness. Recall that testimony, like other archaic verbal forms of high intensity (such as the oath or curse) inevitably requires physical presence—even a filmed deposition is conducted in the presence of the authorities.
These emodied communications will soon regain their ancient status. In order to believe the speech, I will need to bear witness to the speaker.
People were charmed when the chatbots appeared. How sweet to talk with such a polite machine.
They next phase—when the machine issues orders and demands—won’t be quite so charming. But even the most brutal demands will be delivered in a gentle, beguiling voice.
The launch of Instagram (2010) and Snapchat (2011) served as the first indicators that pictographs would return as a dominant form of communication.
Somebody should update the song “Walk Like an Egyptian” as “Talk Like an Egyptian.” We’ve now gone totally pharaoh—and entire conversations can happen without the intrusion of a single phoneme.
When images replace words and concepts, thinking skills erode—and do so rapidly.
Neil Postman saw this coming decades ago. He wrote:
Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.
It’s sobering to think that he already grasped this in 1985.
What they tell the high school debate team:
Successful debate relies on logical thinking supported by facts. Do not use insults, personal attacks, and emotional appeals—you will get dinged points.
What they teach oneline:
Successful debate relies on insults, personal attacks, and emotional appeals. Do not use logical information or facts—you will get dinged points.
Ideologues are foolish to believe that they can control public discourse it they take over the schools.
I saw the exact opposite during my formative years. Those were the final days of widespread censorship before things loosened up—and the more the teachers tried to control what students said and thought, the more youngsters rebelled.
That’s why you should let your ideological enemies control the schools. Within a generation, they will have turned the majority of people against them.
Scholar Perry Link recently described the longterm impact of getting blacklisted in China. It depressed him—at least at first. He could no longer visit friends there, or attend conferences, or do research, or teach.
But his credibility increased as an inevitable result of the official sanctions.
He said he finally understood the full power of his blacklisting, when he showed up one day to teach at UC Riverside.
A young blond male on a skateboard came careening my way. He jumped off in front of me and neatly flipped the board upward with his foot to catch it in his right hand.
“Professor Link!” he said.
“Yes…?”
“I hear you’re on a Chinese government blacklist!”
“Yes, that’s right…”
“Dude!” he shouted, gave me a thumbs up, and skated off.
In the aftermath, Link gained a reputation for courage, honesty, reliability, and forthrightness that he could never have achieved without the blacklisting.
I think about this a lot when I mull over growing evidence that I’ve been shadowbanned on Twitter. Maybe I should thank Elon Musk.
In some societies, discourse is totally micro-managed—not just by government, but by every large institution. Teachers, media, politicians, corporations all work together to define acceptable discourse.
When this happens, foolish observers believe that these combined forces are invincible. Who would dare oppose them? But in every historical era, this kind of monolithic power has the exact opposite effect from what it intends.
It gets mocked and ridiculed. People instinctively grow suspicious of everything it promotes. They lose respect for authority and hatch plans for rebellion.
At first this occurs in secret—because these institutions have so much power. But institutional power is not the same thing as prestige. And when the first cracks appear in the edifice, they spread rapidly.
That’s the paradox—the most powerful discourse is actually the most vulnerable.
This will soon become clear in the world of institutionalized digital discourse. In fact, it’s already starting. Just consider the huge shift of influence from insiders to outsiders during the last 12-18 months.
If Marshall McLuhan saw all those selfies on Instagram he would weep.
The medium has no message. But users are too busy looking at themselves to notice.
65 years ago, political scientist Richard Neustadt shocked the ruling class when he claimed that the President of the United States had only one real power—merely the power to persuade.
He quoted Harry Truman, who predicted that his successor, General Dwight Eisenhower, would be shocked by how little authority he had in the Oval Office:
“He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army.”
Social media has turned us all into presidents of this sort. When otherwise nice people go online, they go on a power trip—taunting, demanding, mocking, ridiculing, strutting, preening, and the like.
But all this is worthless without the power to persuade. We are generals without an army.
Filmmakers deliberately make it difficult to hear the spoken dialogue in films today. Director Christopher Nolan took the lead in this race into incoherence—and says he really doesn’t care whether people find it hard to grasp the words. Many other filmmakers now imitate this immersive style.
These films are tremendous successes at the box office. Does this indicate the final exhaustion of language in a culture that only cares about images?
Fact-checking is pointless when discourse is driven by emotions, images, and cheerleading.
Yet we have armies of fact-checkers at work (both amateurs and professionals)—while nobody tries to keep hostility or anger in check.
These online factcheckers are like referees at TV wrestling matches, who pretend to enforce rules that the combatants have no intention of following.
And if they did impose fair constraints, the audience would riot.
Gregory Bateson warned that the most dangerous change you can possibly make to any system is removing the feedback loop.
He admired the steam engine—which channeled enormous power into productive tasks. But it only worked, he explained, because a feedback loop prevented the engine from exploding.
Web businesses have eliminated feedback controls of this sort—because they want to be scalable and go viral. Anything that slows down that process is viewed as an obstacle.
In this context, we should expect web discourse to have two defining qualities—first it escalates, and then it explodes.
Not long ago, stupid comments were just stupid comments.
But they have risen in the world. Now they’re training data sets.
If you want to be a successful media pundit in this environment, you must have blistering hot takes that get people riled up.
There’s just one problem. The surest way to get fired from your media job in this environment is to have blistering hot takes that get people riled up.
This self-defeating situation is inevitable when insiders want to be outsiders. But they can only pretend. The blistering hot take will always belong to the rebel.
What happens when commercials are more trustworthy than programming?
Or when you can no longer tell the difference between the two?
I’ve traveled a lot in my life—but mostly to earn a living, and only rarely for pleasure.
Even so, I’ve always enjoyed talking to taxi drivers. I like to know that they are thinking. I can still remember many of these conversations decades later.
Nowadays, I do the same, but mostly with Uber drivers. They come from all over the world, so I can learn from every one of them.
In the future, I expect to get rides in driverless cars. But I will still talk to the driver—because it will be useful to know what the machines are thinking.
“I have a problem.”
“Don’t worry, we have an app for that.”
SIX MONTHS LATER
“The app caused even worse problems.”
“Don’t worry, we have a pill for that.”
We must fear the consequences when people are encouraged to talk constantly (there’s an app for that) but nobody ever listens to them (there’s only a pill for that).
What will be the results?
Let me make a list. We should expect widespread depression, anger, hostility, loneliness. Above all, people will turn to extreme activities and behavior patterns—cults, drugs, violence, etc.—just to feel alive.
The machines (and their owners) will be the last to figure this out.
A sign of childhood: Having imaginary friends.
Adulthood today: Having imaginary friends named Alexa and Siri.
A new brain implant translates thoughts into real time speech. They tried it out on a woman and it worked perfectly. It all happens instantaneously—like transcription software.
This sounds like the premise for a comedy movie. Or a horror movie. Or a tragedy. Or all three put together.
We’re fortunate that the implant doesn’t connect to the Internet. But that will surely come next. Celebrities will have two separate accounts. One for themselves, and another for their brains.
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