“Fake News” is a Tautological Red Herring
Why we should not jump to “solving” the online media “problem”
This morning I attended an NYC Media Lab workshop framed around “solving the fake news problem.” In the session, Matthew Jones (professor of history at Columbia University) rightly pointed out that the problem isn’t new. He isn’t the first to call out this fallacy, and, citing John Adams, he importantly emphasized that states have an incentive to foment fear around fake news as an engine to inflate sovereignty. “Production and verification of facts,” he posited, is fragile and rare.
We swim- and always have- in a sea of misinformation. This is also evidenced by the “fact” that some 50% of peer reviewed results cannot be replicated even by the same researchers who produced them in the first place. And let’s go back even further: Plato famously said that writing was a “step backward for truth.”
None of this is to say we should give up on the media, or on the project of constructing a shared narrative frame — arguably the glue of a stable social system. And we may need to fight for it harder than ever (even more reason to put strategy ahead of tactics). But what we are witnessing with the modern moral panic over “fake news,” with its gun-toting vigilante investigators, its flat-earthers, its Macedonian trolls, and its tweeters-in-chief, is a difference in scale, not a difference in kind.
If we aim to be cohesive and analytical about what forest we are glimpsing for so many troubling trees: What we’re seeing is the biological evolution — because it is environmentally driven and adaptive — of a set of skills for detecting narrative manipulation and distortion; a bullshit detector at the level of culture. We are seeing a distributed and decentralized meta-analysis of the project of constructing the truth. We are seeing society getting woke to the tenuous and precarious nature of reality. Far from a contemporary project of the right, we can trace this specific trajectory back to psychedelic ‘60s academia. And — just as a thought experiment — what if this “problem,” which now also looks like narrative fragmentation, increased extremism, reflexive loss of trust in foundational institutions, and looming chaos…is actually evidence of progress?
The project of the media, of communication in general, has never been to produce truth, but rather to produce meaning. When we talk about solutions, we want to harken back to a time where that cultural narrative production was cohesive and tightly controlled; when our “imagined communities” had defined boundaries. But power has always wielded that capacity as a weapon. If we situate the problem and seek solutions to it at the level of citizen journalists and techy trolls — whether through regulation, algorithms, stakeholder activism, or individual agency — we tacitly propose retrenchment: doubling down on recentralized power and control. With concerted effort, we might be able to debug the problem of asymmetric fake news, but fake news itself is a feature, not a bug, of western civilization.
We need to start asking a different set of questions: not about where the problem is and who is in a position to solve it, but about what’s really at stake when we are ready to admit this has been a feature of our system all along.
What’s at stake in a world where there is no (possible) shared cohesive narrative frame on what reality is? When the idea of an ‘objective truth’ is a joke in the face of quantum mechanics and multiple virtual realities? When we can customize not only micro-targeted audiences for communications, but also the genomes from which we grow, the frames we occupy, the realities in which we live and wake?
What’s at stake when the media we consume is no longer just in competition for our eyeballs and our wallets, but in contest to control our every thought and action?
In a world where anything can be faked, is it better to evolve the skill set to question everything, or try to design guardrails around what can be called “facts?”
If we can agree we are in the business of constructing reality, what type of reality do we want to construct? What values do we want to meme and encode — and in service of what goals? As Latour put it: “Are you ready, and at the price of what sacrifice, to live the good life together?”
Questions like this allow us to dig into the deep systems and structures that form the scaffolding onto which all societal phenomena grow. Without asking them, we risk designing “solutions” that quickly become their own problems. A one hour workshop, in which very smart people for very practical reasons explicitly decide to “skip over the part where we define the problem,” is not the place to ask these questions… Where/what/when is?
The views I’ve expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
