Quration 25: The Pursuit of Truth
Welcome to Quration - my take on the stand-out stories of technological disruption.
In today's edition, I throw my hands up in the air over the changing media landscape and the pursuit of truth!
You’ll rarely find me defending Google, and Facebook almost never. But here I am, shaking my head at the Australian government’s attempt to make the tech monoliths pay Murdoch for the privilege of sending his withering media empire a daily audience of readers.
Shaking my head, and laughing, because the whole thing is pointless. The fragmentation of media happened long ago, and there’s no hope the Murdoch-Morrison alliance will put the pieces back together again.
The exponential growth of Youtube daily shows, podcasts, newsletters, twitter feeds, and live-streaming conversations has been in full swing for years. Traditional media needs to take their place as a minority player, and adjust their operating models so that they can become healthy participants in an internet-led reality.
I won’t bother explaining what’s going on. That’s already been well done by Ben Evans and others. Instead, I think this matter highlights the bigger issue we have with media, power and lies.
Morrison isn’t interested in the media landscape. If successful, his policy would boost the tabloid media, and penalise the emergent high-quality news industry. His interest is in headlines and grandstanding. He’s using his power to meddle in affairs he doesn’t understand, producing unintended consequences that will be to our collective detriment.
Murdoch isn’t interested in fair distribution of media revenues. If anything, he should be paying Google and Facebook for all of the free traffic they send his media outlets each day. He’s using his local lobbying power in an attempt to extract undeserved revenues that will give his geriatric business a few more years of life support.
Hidden behind all this noise is the real issue. Google, Facebook, and countless other tech giants refuse to pay reasonable taxes to the countries in which they operate. Legally extracting those taxes is close to impossible. So Murdoch et al created a ruse that would hide the government’s tax grab,
As you would expect, their concoction is a chimera. Facebook took one look at the proposed deal and pulled the plug on all news links for Australian users. Google went through the motions of negotiations, but ended up offering the same News Showcase service they had been planning to implement since last year.
Any money that may be extracted through this subsidy scheme won’t see its way into government coffers, but instead will fall into the hands of the least deserving.
Nothing is ever as it seems. Obfuscation abounds, and Truth is coming out of her well armed with a switch to chastise mankind.
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
— George Orwell
Old things have become new
My take is that the growth of new versions of the news has been driven by our subconscious pursuit of truth. We called bullshit on the old news model, and a new one emerged.
Old news products were concise, controlled and contrived.
A weekly, 30-minute, ultra-produced TV show. A two-paragraph response to a newspaper article, created and distributed by a PR team. A five-minute interview with a company representative regurgitating the same media points over and over.
New news is unconstrained, unrehearsed and unfiltered.
Youtube daily shows that go for an hour, every day, explaining why the latest all-time-high price for bitcoin happened and why the parabolic growth is likely to continue for the next month.
Podcasts that go for hours, with guests explaining in minutiae why they decided to stop users from buying Gamestop shares, and whether or not they received direct pressure from their clearing house partners.
Newsletters that blather on for thousands of words about breaking stories that happened just last night. Summaries, analysis, predictions.
And booming new services, like Clubhouse, that let you be a fly on the wall observing live-streaming conversations between people that matter on issues that matter.
One thing they have in common: with long-form, live-response content, there’s nowhere to hide. It’s much harder to fake it when you’re getting questioned for hours, deep-diving on details, in front of a live audience.
The best players have dispensed with the bullshit. They call it as they see it.
In the multitude of words sin is not lacking
— Proverbs 10:19
Direct access
We’ve never had better access to the billionaires, thought leaders, decision makers and market breakers than we do right now. Twitter feeds, podcast streams and Clubhouse conversations give us exposure to their unfiltered thoughts and ideas. Unedited and with no puppeteers.
Naval shares his philosophy for the modern world for free on Twitter. Marc Andreessen dumbs down his genius for an hour at a time to host Clubhouse conversations. And Chamath Palihapitiya shares his one-pager business analyses with followers so they can get in on the ground floor of his latest SPAC.
But Naval left the reservation when it came to COVID, leaving his flock dazed and confused. Andreessen was maliciously maligned by the NYT on his first night out with Clubhouse, and will probably take his bat and ball home like he did with Twitter. And then there’s Chamath. Funny, genius, billionaire Chamath is still desperate for validation, unable to restrain himself from posting photos of his budding six-pack abs on Twitter.
The point is, even the best of us are flawed humans propelled by hidden motives. Even if the billionaires are giving us their version of the truth, that doesn’t mean it’s truth.
To get closer to the truth, we have to think about what’s motivating the messenger and how that may be manipulating the message.
Why does Andreessen bother to put his head above the parapet again? Why does someone as successful as Puru Saxena take the time to live tweet his stock insights and deal with the hecklers? Why does Chamath have such a good core and such weak chicken legs?
In the good old days, we’d identify bad deeds as the obvious consequence of greed, pride and lust. These days it’s all about insecurity, narcissism, and nihilism. Has our ascension of Maslow’s hierarchy just led us to different reasons for the same behaviour?
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
— Virginia Woolf
We need an interpreter
I can’t find the reference, but I remember a pre-Trump podcast where Venkatesh Rao was predicting that a future president would wear a body cam 24/7 to give the public full transparency of his/her every engagement. Reality TV meets transparent governance.
With Trump, we got the Reality TV without the transparency. Unless the cameras are turned on for every moment, the best we can achieve is partial transparency. Partial transparency is no transparency at all.
And so it is with all of the billionaires, experts and leaders of the day. Without full transparency of every motivation and manipulation, how can we expect truth. But full transparency is an impossibility.
The best we can hope for is an accurate set of data and an honest attempt at interpreting it. This is the same approach we’ve followed for millennia.
—> God was Truth. The priest interpreted that truth and conveyed it to the people in the Temple. Mosque, Synagogue, or Church.
—> After the Gutenberg press, God was still truth, but the printed bible conveyed that truth, and the people interpreted the truth for themselves.
—> After the Internet, data has become the source of truth, and the billionaires / experts have become the interpreters of truth. The people access it live or on-demand over the Internet.
Direct access + unfiltered + real time = less distortion + less manipulation + more truth.
Next stop, Dystopia
What next?
Data will continue to be the source of truth, AI will produce a bias-free interpretation of the data, and we will have constant awareness of the truth.
Perhaps that’s too ridiculous. How about this:
All news/data is live-verified and fed into a distributed blockchain. A series of interpretation layers are applied to the data, based on GPT-10 versions of the world’s best and brightest analysts. The results are adjusted to account for biases, and the model continues to improve until the most accurate interpretation of data is produced every time. Everyone has equal access to true information.
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.
— James A. Garfield
Greek philosopher Democritus' said "The truth lies at the bottom of the well." From where I sit, every new social app seems to be little more than a fast race to the dirty underbelly of mankind. I doubt we’ll find truth while we’re down there.
If you'd like to see more of what I'm exploring, or you've come across something you think I should check out, please follow me on twitter.