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Hello!
It’s pomegranate season. And hot damn I’ve been eating a lot of pomegranates. I’ve eaten roughly one a day for a month. They are so juicy and sweet. I feel like Gollum when I eat them but I don’t care. They stain my new shirt but I don’t care. Eating a pomegranate is like eating a hot wing. You get all primal with it. It’s not about the taste but the journey. It’s a snaxperience.
Pomegranate season is almost over. I hope you were able to consume at least one. If not, I beg of you, please eat one this week. Lose yourself in the pom.
1) Ok then. In other news, here’s a snippet from a reader’s response to last week’s article: 15 Lessons of Networked Democracy.
What good is a contextual label if politicians wear it as a badge of honor? (They’d say: "Labels are added by the intellectual elite as a way to censor the truth.")
This is indeed an issue.
One part of this “badge of honor” comes from the Streisand Effect—attempts to hide information unintentionally publicize it more. By censoring a Trump tweet, we amplify it. [Tell a lie ➡ get moderated ➡ get attention.]
The second part of this badge comes from the removal of our lying accountability mechanism. Usually, lies get punished. We can imagine a parallel reality where Trump’s birther lies about Obama get punished. Where Trump loses face, or investments, or something. But if you’re Trump-style shameless, it doesn’t matter. Instead we get: [Tell a lie ➡ get shamed ➡ embrace shame.]
Perhaps most importantly, lies are never fully confirmed as lies. COVID patients in South Dakota claim COVID is a hoax in their final breath. The Symbolic is decoupled from The Real. This decoupling is especially powerful with “Medium-Sized Lies”, which Anne Applebaum details in her recent book, Twilight of Democracy.
Medium-sized lies aren’t fully false. When Trump says the “Chinese Virus”, that’s not really a lie. The virus did come from China. But it also isn’t what we should call SARS-CoV-2. “Chinese Virus” exists in a liminal space of neither truth nor fiction, but in a, let’s call it “healthy”, relationship with both.
Medium-sized lies are lenticular—they look like lies to some and truth to others.
For another medium-sized lie, take a conspiracy theory like fraudulent votes. Sure, there are a couple of examples of voter fraud this year. But it’s mostly false. However, what this medium-sized lie really does is bring attention to its speakers and delegitimize institutions. The received attention incentivizes another medium-sized lie, and the process repeats.
In fact, by decreasing institutional trust, medium-sized lies are undermining our democracy. 70% of Republicans don’t think the election was “free and fair” (up from 35% before the election). As Obama says in this interview with The Atlantic:
Interviewer: Is this new malevolent information architecture bending the moral arc away from justice?
Obama: I think it is the single biggest threat to our democracy.If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.
Many of our accountability mechanisms have been reversed.
Moderating content used to decrease its spread. But now it spreads it more.
Shame was once a negative. But authentic shamelessness turns it positive.
Less trust used to be bad for public government servants. But now, less institutional trust allows candidates to speak directly to their people, without annoying media overhead.
Plus, there’s no reason for a medium-sized liar to change their ways. QAnon politicians like Majorie Greene can compete in medium-sized lies, but are completely outclassed in science-backed data. Better to stick to your lane, lest you be outcompeted by a better liar.
So my friends, be wary of liminal, lenticular, medium-sized lies. They corrupt our marketplace of ideas and the foundations of our democracy.
2) New podcast interview this week: #74 Roman Krznaric: Metaphors to Be a Good Ancestor By.
Roman and I chatted about his new book, The Good Ancestor. I quite enjoyed this conversation and especially enjoyed how Roman is thinking about language. He’s helping to craft and spread phrases that encourage long-term thinking: being a time rebel (think Greta), intergenerational justice, decolonizing the future, and prioritizing futureholders (instead of shareholders).
This interview really gets at the heart of how I’m viewing our current paradigm change. We’ll increasingly prioritize Future Us. That ethical shift will be embedded in “concrete” things like rights for rivers and seed vaults (or Oreo vaults) for future humanity. But it’ll also be manifest in our language and metaphors. In fact, language is how we can get close to “touching” the paradigm substrate itself, rather than just seeing manifestations of it.
Related: One of my readers showed me Mike Mena’s amazing Youtube channel that explains “how language acts on the world”. In this video, Mike explains how using the article “the” creates groups (“the blacks”) and how the word “snowflakes” creates power dynamics. Great stuff.
LINKS
1) This is so cool. UPS and DHL are building football field-sized “freezer farms” for cold storage of Covid-19 vaccine deliveries.
2) Great Gen Z Trends Report from ZebraIQ. I like the word cloud:
We can find the following word groupings:
Ironesty: sarcastic/ironic/self-deprecating + authentic/self-aware.
Domestic cozy: comfort/close
Responsible consumerism: value-driven/outspoken/activism
3) The pope’s monthly intention for November:
We pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind.
4) Every week, I share a link from The Onion. Today’s: New United Ultra Economy Class Tickets Lets Passengers Get Dragged Behind Plane By Giant Rope.
I’ve also been searching for (and found!) some right-leaning satire: the Babylon Bee. Here’s one of their recent pieces: Girlfriend Keeps Referring To Herself As 'Wife-Elect' Despite No Official Word From Boyfriend. That’s funny! I think it’s crucial to make fun of the left, and so I’ll continue to surface the dankest satire from PepeLand aka Babylon Bee, etc.
JOBS AND OPPORTUNITIES
RadicalXChange fellowship runs from Jan-March next year. Apply here by Dec 13.
Positive Money is a UK-based non-profit focused on making the banking system more equitable. They’re hiring an Interim Executive Director.
MetaGov is hiring a Research Engineer to work on metagovernance standards across internet communities.
EVENTS
Weekly Bento (recurring on Sundays)
Effective Altruist Events Calendar (recurring)
Interintellect Salons (recurring)
The Stoa (recurring)
MUSIC
This week we have a fun new episode of the Lindy Bro Radio show. My brother and I chat about Hamilton and hardcore music (Nordic EDM with aggressive four-on-the-floor).
Hope you have a good week! Warmth, Rhys
❤️ Thanks to my generous patrons ❤️
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