A New Distributed Intelligence is Running The Show
And it's slowly eroding the last distributed intelligence.
Marc Hochstein’s recent review of several books on journalistic malpractice—including his father’s memoir about a short career in tabloids—sparked the idea for this piece a few weeks ago. It’s been gelling in my sub-conscious ever since.
Later, my father interviewed a woman in a hospital bed who had been arrested by two cops, one of whom, she said, beat her up. He then interviewed the cop, who acknowledged using force, and didn’t mention his partner. Dad wrote the story, naming only the cop who’d administered the beating. The editor rewrote the piece—under Peter Hochstein’s byline—extending the charge to include the partner, and refused to explain when my dad asked why. A “naïve jerk,” barely 21 years old at the time, my dad writes ruefully that he didn’t think to complain to their boss.
It’s probably an overstatement to say “journalists lied all the time in the so-called good old days.” But they probably lied more often than people like Barclay and I grew up believing.
Here’s where the internet, even social media, with its turbo-charged feedback loops, may play a constructive role.
One of the first readers to question Rolling Stone’s 2014 UVA story, the editor-in-chief of the financial publication Worth, did so not in his magazine but on his blog, and could easily have done it in a Twitter thread. For expressing doubts, he was excoriated by other journalists determined to push the campus rape narrative—and eventually vindicated when Rolling Stone retracted the story and settled three defamation lawsuits.
I doubt “citizen journalists” can replace professional journalists. (As one of the latter, I would say that, wouldn’t I?) It’s a full-time job. But our fellow citizens can now keep us honest by flagging our errors in real time. Maybe the anybody-can-allege-anything free-for-all of social media is a fair price to pay for this added layer of accountability.
Rather than a “post-truth era,” maybe we are entering a “post-credulity era” in which misinformation is revealed for what it is much faster than it used to be and consumers are slowly learning not to blindly trust anything they read, see or hear—regardless of the source’s prestige.
The first thought which arose in my mind, while I was stalling on grabbing a few cases of beer for a customer and finishing the article, was of a provocative assertion Marshall McLuhan made in Understanding Media.
What… wait?
Chapter Seven of UM begins
It was Bertrand Russell who declared that the great discovery of the twentieth century was the technique of the suspended judgement.
Composition of the piece you are now reading quickly hit a snag. Several hours of research failed to determine where the hell Russell—the famed English philosopher and logician whose work with A.N. Whitehead on a consistent and self-validating system of formal logic was wrecked by Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (for which Alan Turing invented computers as proof)—actually made such a wild declaration.
Let’s assume that we’re talking about a specific technique which had been discovered. Certainly nobody could believe, let alone Russell or McLuhan, that the act of waiting a while before deciding something was only discovered in the past century-and-a-quarter.
When I shared my snag to the McLuhan Facebook Group, Professor Adam Pugen helpfully pointed to the use of the Greek term epoché in phenomenology to place the philosophical origins of suspended judgement in ancient Pyrrhonic skepticism.
The term was popularized in Phenomenology by Edmund Husserl in 1906. Husserl elaborates the notion of ‘bracketing’… Through the systematic procedure of ‘phenomenological reduction’, one is thought to be able to suspend judgment regarding the general or naive philosophical belief in the existence of the external world, and thus examine phenomena as they are originally given to consciousness.—Wikipedia article on Epoché
So, while we await more clarification, let’s take the words out of Russel’s mouth and return them to a more-certain source (if not origin). Why would McLuhan assert that the greatest discovery was the technique of suspended judgement?
What do you know?
Reformulated, then, let’s posit—and I believe it to be true—that the 20th century demanded the creation and adoption of techniques for suspending judgement and living with uncertainty for everyone. At a scale never before seen, for people at every level of civilization, we can only really pretend to know what the hell is going on. (That fact that we must believe we know what is going on in order to do anything is also noted, gravely.)
Their is a common account about how this situation came about. It says that radical scientific and mathematical breakthroughs destroyed the Western intellect’s long-held faith in a clock-work, Newtonian universe of billiard-ball atoms set into deterministic motion by God. Or in a world that could be explained totally by a complete, formal system of science and logic. Like a series of wrecking balls, the theories of evolution and relativity and quantum physics and Kurt Gödel destroyed our moorings within the these old certainties, and thus of anything once-called reality.
McLuhan’s better story is that the spread of electric technology—the onslaught of causality and mediated perceptions from around the globe via the instantenaity of telegraphy and radio waves—violently ripped each individual Westerner’s mind out its mechanistic, parochial rut into the wild openness necessary to appreciate the subtleties of these later, contrarian theories.
We know from our own past the kind of energy that is released, as by fission, when literacy exploded the tribal or family unit. What do we know about the social and psychic energies that develop by electric fusion or implosion when literate individuals are suddenly gripped by an electromagnetic field, such as occurs in the new Common Market pressures in Europe?… It is the difference between the “A” bomb and the “H” bomb. The latter is more violent, by far.—Understanding Media, pg. 50
The mass spectacles and revolutions and wars of the 19th and early 20th century traumatized everyone with the dread knowledge that the world was too big to predict or understand or control. Occultism flourished. Only then could the formerly-undetectable need for revisions complete do-overs in physics and math develop and spread in this wake.
Tribalism, Again
So what we’re left with is tribes who, to various degrees, suspend and resume various judgements all together in lockstep. In fact, let’s call ideology that schema or system of suspended and resumed judgements which tie a group or tribe together.
[A]n ideology is the popularized sentimental degeneration of a political doctrine or worldview; it involves a mixture of passions and rather incoherent intellectual elements, always related to present realities…
Anything can become an ideology, just as anything can become one: Nationalism, Socialism, Liberalism, Democracy, Marxism, Anti-Racism, Feminism, etc. Often an ideology springs up to parry an ideology-free practice. Male domination, for example, has no explicitly formulated ideology; feminist ideology arises to oppose it. Capitalism is a practice with no explicitly formulated ideology; socialist ideology arises to oppose it. Afterward, capitalism will produce an ideology of “defense.”—Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology by Jacques Ellul, pg. 1
Suspended judgement is an accomodation to the unknown. A dark spot you live with. Something we can only think of playfully, but cannot seriously deliberate without immediately negating or questioning it. Ideologies spring up, then, in large part as clear declarations about knowing something; especially about someone or everyone else’s unknowns.
Enough people get together in common claim to know something everyone else doesn’t, and if the fight to establish their claim lasts long enough, then boom, you get a tribe and ideology, bound together in common adversity around their shared claim. A claim which transcends their individuality.
First, the good news
In 1994, Pierre Lévy released L'intelligence collective: Pour une anthropologie du cyberspace, released in English in 1997 as Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Let us read the following, considering television and newspaper as “molar” and “transcendent” (centrally organized), and the unregulated “free-speech” internet as “molecular:”
How do we stop treating men and women entropically, in bulk, in the mass, as if they were interchangeable within their categories and consider them as unique individuals? How can we make it obvious that the other is a unique bearer of skill and creativity? When intelligently managed organizations are no longer able to confront the complexity of existing situations, how do we make the transition to organizations that are collectively intelligent?…
We can distinguish three main ideal types among the variety of political technologies. Families, clans, and tribes are organic groups. Nations, institutions, religions, large corporations, as well as the revolutionary “masses” are organized groups, molar groups, which undergo a process of transcendence or exteriority in forming and maintaining themselves. Finally, self-organized, or molecular, groups realize the ideal of direct democracy within very large communities in the process of mutation and deterritorialization…
In a system organized around molecular politics, groups are no longer considered as sources of energy to be exploited for their labour but as collective intelligences that develop and redevelop their projects and resources, continuously refine their skills, and attempt to enhance their individual qualities indefinitely. Able to reorganize in real time, minimizing delays, deadlines, and friction, the molecular group evolves at room temperature without sudden change. The politics of separation and transcendence is to the diversity and richness of human action what heavy industry was to natural resources and the environment: It exploits without consideration and in the end destroys more than it creates. When observed on the molecular level of individual lives and human relations, order in molar groups appears to be nothing more than disorder and mindless waste. On the other hand, by generalizing the concept of “zero contempt” characteristic of new methods of management, molecular politics, or nanopolitics, enhances the very substance of social relations at the finest level of detail and on a just-in-time basis. It makes use of every human act, enhances individual qualities…
The multiplication of molecular communities assumes the relative declines of media-based communication for the benefit of a cyberspace that is receptive to collective intelligence, a space that becomes increasingly navigable and accessible as molecular technologies become operational and available at low cost.
Lévy’s prediction here is typical of the optimistic or utopian books of the ‘90s which witnessed the humanitarian potential of modern media to unveil to change the world. Of course, activists are usually the most sensitive to means by which to change hearts and mind, and are driven by awareness of corruption and injustice.
The Rodney King tape—recorded by a bystander with a hand-held video camera and aired on local news—had revealed racism and brutality in the Los Angeles police, leading to riots and reform. Indra Sinha’s 1999 novel The Cybergypsies: a True Tale of Lust, War, and Betrayal on the Electronic Frontier features many netizens who are inspired to join Amnesty International after their internet-addiction exposes them to atrocities like the Bhopal disaster, when an American company poisoned 500,000 people in India.
Claims that “Western industrial operations in the 3rd world are exploitation!” or “The police are racist thugs!” are more than just then-radical observations which have today become normalized into banality. They only gained sufficient traction to become normalized thanks to electronic media. The gatekeepers to news and the counter-efforts at public relations failed to marginalize the voices, armed to the teeth with evidence, who were making these claims.
The evidence was irrefutable in the face of all claims to the contrary. This is largely because there was no large body of people explicitly, dogmatically for corrupt police beating black Americans or poisoning people the developing world. But, with time, an ideology finds it useful to project such an opposing body into existence.
And, so, in the past thirty years, once-radical claims such as these have become totally assimilated into the mainstream to end up, today, the normative political viewpoint of most major institutions. The originating events have become myth and, thus, the point-of-view formulated against systemic injustice has become a deterritorialized ideology used by the system for directing the mass-audiance’s psychological projections onto contemporary events and persons.
The Race to Establish the Narrative
The formation of mass tribes in the late 20th century was optimized along the lines of television. Television news, while separate from print journalism, worked tightly in reporting with the traditional press.
Just like in a court-room, we don’t want journalists to render a verdict before verifying facts. We’d desire them to suspend judgement. At the same time, journalists have deadlines and to get scooped means to lose the lead. The race to print, or to get a story on air, is life or death and jumping the gun is common practice. This is what the accounts in Marc’s above-linked review illustrate over and over.
What’s happened since the great 2014 war for ethics in video games journalism is the ascent into dominance of today’s American government of a different electronic tribe, with its own strategies for suspending and resuming judgement about world events and how they are delivered to us in larger “narratives” about the world. More importantly, it’s own rate of doing so.
This new tribe is just a distributed, non-institutionalized and thus ungovernable operation of individuals all talking to one another and sharing “evidence” and anecdotes on Twitter. And, by talking on Twitter all day, every day, for ten years, they’ve out-paced newsrooms, classrooms, courtrooms, and congresses in establishing an ideology of free speech to undermine the slower mechanisms of suspended judgement inherent to the daily operations of these older institutions.
Again, we’d like to suspend judgement on deciding something long enough to get all the facts in. But when sufficient facts are in then the collective intelligence cannot broker a second’s delay on advancing the narrative. Every day the collective intelligence is denied all the details on the Kennedy assassination or the Las Vegas shooting, it grows paranoid wondering why no verdict has been rendered.
Modern CPUs are sped-up by inclusion of many circuits dedicated to “thinking ahead” of decisions upon which judgement is suspended. While the CPU waits to determine whether or A or B is the case, branch predictors follow both A and B as far down the line as they can, until one circuit’s work is proven a waste and discarded in favour of the other’s.
Most of the misinformation online is more clearly understood as precisely such activity. Internet addicts racing to nail down which “timeline” we’re entering explore as many possible interpretations of hazy-facts as possible, pouring their research and speculations online for others to find and assimilate, accommodate, or debunk.
And then they all sit back in the evening, handing out accolades and demerits to whomever ends up having their speculations confirmed on-air by legacy journalist outfits or political leaders.
And when no confirmation from officials is forth-coming, they grow paranoid, continuing deeper and deeper down their branching, speculative timelines, waiting for word on A or B that may never be forthcoming.
Media War
And so, hopefully, we can understand a little more clearly the dynamics of how Trump came into the Whitehouse, and why Elon Musk trusts a bunch of 20-somethings to audit institutions governed by people three times their age: they’re bouncing everything off the collective intelligence of Twitter. This is what “we are the media now” means, whenever Musk or someone else reports it.
There is total transparency to what is involved for every internet addict who is following along. For everyone with a life, who is too busy working all day or too optimistic in life to doom-scroll, what Trump and Musk are presumed to have been hatched by some think-tank or evil manifesto or foreign intelligence operation. All the think-tank output and evil manifestos and foreign intelligence operations are indirectly influencing things, of course, through their metabolization by the collective intelligence of Twitter. This is more than just populism—history is, I’m ever more certain, over-used as myth and under-used as a guide to differentiating what is constant and is change in human affairs.
The newsrooms and classrooms and congresses of elected representatives were the collective intelligences of the past. The internet hiveminds past, present, and future have out-paced them, surrounded them, infiltrated them, and are dismantling them now. The world is a giant contest for arm-chair statesmen LARPing their best Alexander the Great or Winston Churchill or, yes, Adolph Hitler and hoping their time-line branch-prediction is memetically selected.
Any good analysis of the situation will need to not only accept these dynamics, but understand the underlying media landscape which has facilitated it—the deep technical and psychologically-engineered nature of commodity computing and how all media change us.
Is the journalism which still constitutes “reality” for a majority of the populations of our modern nations up to the challenge of explaining all this to people who can’t see that this what has been going on this whole time? I certainly hope so.