In a world where everyone is an editor, who decides what’s true?

What we can learn from Clubhouse, conspiracy theories and binary thinking.

This is the latest installment from a haphazardly written collection of musings from me on the world today and how its changing…

I’ve spent the morning in a Clubhouse conspiracy theory rabbit hole. For those of you less prone to FOMO than I am, Clubhouse is a new social media app built around ‘Rooms’ or audio conversations. You join a room, and your phone turns into a radio — broadcasting a conversation between a selection of sometimes tens of speakers on a topic of the day. There are a million topics, from making your millions to psychedelic herbalism. And this morning, I entered the room called ‘conspiracy theories’.

I’m not going to report here on what was a semi-private/public conversation. I feel like what happens in closed conversations should be respected, and I seem to believe that everyone deserves a space they can share what’s on their minds without fear of being ‘outed’. At the same time, I feel a conflict in that. Because perhaps this is part of the issue — that views and beliefs are being built in the shadows, and then we wonder how a man wearing bull horns and furs can storm the Capitol building in the belief that the world is being run by aliens and that Trump is a messenger sent from God to purify us.

So. In that Clubhouse room, the conversation swung from how vaccines will activate nano-technology implanted in our bodies, to how CERN’s hadron collider is responsible for time travel which is screwing with our sense of reality. In the meantime, back on social media and website comments sections, we all come across people on the spectrum of vaccine doubt — is it safe? Is it an implant? Is it the latest wave of a world order set on totalitarian domination?

These words come from idiots and ego-maniacs, and from smart, caring people, and from conservatives and liberals, and artists and scientists. They come from friends I studied with. They come from people who just like to create a stir. In a space where the left and the right are overlapping to create a wholly new social-political segment populated with those who are on a quest to take control of their own minds with what they see as a truer version of reality than the one we are typically served. Fuelled by a mistrust the media, they see themselves defining their own truth, and using the socialisation of media to give that view a voice. Even if it’s false.

When I listen to them, to try and understand where this all comes from. This is the upgrade, they are saying. It’s time to get on board and see the lower grade world for what it is, a place where something is deeply amiss. Where the rich and powerful are set on exploiting us, where our governments are intent on controlling us, where big tech is progressively owning our identities, where our media is trying to both enrage and pacify us, and where we know deep in the spiritual substance of our insides that there is more to living than shopping and Netflix.

Which is where this gets tricky, right? Because if you take those last 4 sentences, there is some truth in each one. Or I should say, based on my limited world view, I think there is probably some truth in each one. Not the whole truth. Not every action of every day. But we can all concede that things aren’t great right now. Because 5 years ago the biggest issues were city-centre terrorism, the Syrian refugee crisis and an excessively bland political sphere. Five years later we have a global pandemic, Trump, Brexit, Fox News and five people dead after MAGA mob storm Capitol Hill. It’s not that one is crazier than the other. It’s that crazy is changing so damn quickly.

And like them, like all of us, I’m not sure how to make sense of it. What is truth? How do we talk about this? How do we move forward when different groups see the world with totally different foundations?

As I ponder how we move forwards, there are two things that fall out of this for me. The first is the danger of binary thinking (check out Virginia Vigliar’s brilliant post for more on this). That MAGA and anti-vax and 5G become possible when we commit to something always being just one thing, and never another. If you believe there is a totalitarian conspiracy to dominate us, then everything becomes evidence to support that belief. Sure, they say. But if there is no conspiracy, then how do explain everything that’s happening? Open your eyes man!

And binary thinking feels SO GOOD. Like some sense has been made. OH — it’s THIS. THAT’S WHY. For a moment, we breathe easy, because the world makes sense again. It’s harder to sit in ‘I don’t know’. In the complicated messiness of a globally interconnected world where everything affects everything else, at speed, and with unpredictability. I feel like Brene Brown’s new work (which she references in this podcast interview with Obama) feels critical right now: as she implores us to get comfortable with the acceleration in complexity, to resist over-simplifying, to open space for the non-binary. To be able to say, ‘I’m not sure’, and maybe I should outsource this one to someone who knows better.

And the second thing is this. In a long lost land of the 20th century, the job of deciding what truth was fit to print was the job of an editor. Someone with decades of experience hunting out fact from fiction, testing the validity of different sources, filtering a world of happenings for those that were truly significant. Here in 2021, it feels almost a betrayal of ourselves to outsource our concept of truth to another human being. But until humans at large become much better editors, with actual, deep, studied skills in sourcing, tapped into the analysis of the world’s leading experts, I can’t help but feel we should all just take a step back from shouting about what we do or don’t know for sure. And to take the experts at their word. (Which means, obviously, get vaccinated.)

But this is hard stuff. Misinformation is rife, but we don’t know how to tackle it. The world is moving at a million miles an hour, but we don’t know how to slow down. The media should be the place where we can coalesce around a common conversation, and yet in the fight for eyeballs it’s less truth and more sensation than we wish it could be.

I don’t know what we do about that. But I think that admitting what we don’t know is a good place to start.

Do you know more? Educate me in the comments.