A system that comes to depend on synthetic signaling for its “information” is doomed to Model Collapse, as its signaling has completely detached from the real world.
That we inhabit a post-truth world seems to accepted wisdom. But that’s only half of it. We also live in a post-trust world. In a post-truth world, everything is shaped by the implicit goals of the entity claiming to state the “truth,” as the entire point of claiming to state the “truth” is to persuade the target populace to agree to something favorable to the issuer of the claimed “truth.”
In other words, the “truth” as something that has no intentional spin of self-interest no longer exists. What is passed off as “truth” is spin intended / designed to serve the interests of those doing the spinning.
This is the definition of propaganda and marketing, which are pure expressions of self-interest, and they’ve been around since the dawn of civilization, as persuading others to do what serves your private interests is much lower cost / more profitable than having to modify their behaviors with force.
The first step in the con of propaganda and marketing is to win the trust of the mark. This is a fascinating process, as some people are willing believers and others are skeptical, and so the trust campaign must speak to both the skeptics and those primed to embrace the message for reasons that have less to do with the entity issuing the message and more to do with their internal beliefs.
The trick with skeptics is to present persuasive evidence–the “facts.” These can be first-person accounts, scientific studies, or something presented as self-evident. The con artist presents the facts as if they are objective and the mark is invited to “decide for yourself:” the con artist claims he has no intent to persuade.
This is humorously illustrated in Melville’s classic novel The Confidence-Man.
The rise of the collection of data and the scientific method introduced the idea of “objective truth” that was based on facts collected from observations that were repeatable by anyone able to isolate the same variables. In other words, these truths could be verified by anyone using the same tools to collect data that isolated the same variables, so it wasn’t a private truth, it was a public truth everyone had to accept as fact.
The power of “objective fact” was too good to pass up, and so manipulating the metrics of data collection and analysis became the new territory of developing trust and establishing “truth” to serve private interests. Sample sizes were kept small, subjects were selected for their likelihood of yielding the desired data, and analytic tools weeded out outliers that undermined or contradicted the pre-selected “results.”
As McLuhan observed, The medium is both the message and the massage, and so the synthetic media that broadcast the human voice and visual images captured our attention and imagination in ways the written word could not. Now we have AI, which mimics human speech so engagingly that we attribute it with human characteristics: intelligence, emotions, empathy, etc.
With social media and smartphones, these media/ AI technologies have scalable visibility and virulence: they are ubiquitous (everywhere) and extremely contagious / virulent, spreading quickly through vast populations.
Few would claim to trust the “truthiness” of social media content or its sources, but that no longer matters. what matters is the signal embedded in the content that triggers a dopamine cascade in the “consumer” of content–what Big Tech calls engagement and others call addiction.
Signals are symbolic short-cuts that bypass rational filters by firing dopamine receptors. This makes them ideal on two counts: they don’t require the lengthy processes required to nurture trust or establish the “truth,” processes which require some connection between the real world and the claim being made.
Signals are small in size and easy to replicate, in effect cognitive/emotional viruses that bypass our cognitive/emotional immune system of skeptical wariness of anything that smacks of self-interest, i.e sure things, guarantees of immense gains and grandiose claims.
Signals bypass the process of connecting a claim to the real world. This is their unmatched power. In the ancient world, pageantry and public displays acted as signals of power, status and victory. The power and status were symbolically on display, as only those with wealth and power could afford such performances.
The importance of these symbolic displays reinforcing the legitimacy and power of elites should not be underestimated. This is why Leonardo Da Vinci was hired to design and engineer lavish parades of movement and color, extravaganzas designed to impress and entrance onlookers.
Such symbolic signaling was enormously costly, and so they reflected real wealth and power, for only those possessing those resources could manage such expense.
Now digital synthetic signaling is virtually free. When Leonardo’s pageantry came to life, it was unmistakably authentic, for it demanded real world resources and labor. Digital synthetic signals require nothing but visibility and virulence–no connections to the real world are required.
So AI’s mastery of natural language signals intelligence, money signals wealth, technology signals Progress, a diploma signals “hire me, I’m a valuable worker,” and so on. Signaling replaces persuasion that is still connected to the real world with dopamine cascades.
Synthetic signaling is inherently self-referential: it’s “trustworthy” and “plausible” because we’ve already seen it elsewhere, and ubiquity is itself a signal of plausibility and trustworthiness, because could so many others be completely wrong?
“Breaking news” must be real, right? Words, images, speech are all easily turned into symbolic signals that carry implicit claims of retaining some connection to the real world when in fact there is none.
Signaling is easily gamed, falsified, curated, edited, cosmetically enhanced and generated by automation, while the real world it supposedly symbolizes / reflects is not so pliable. The Late Western Roman Empire can be viewed as a system that retained sufficient resources to stage signals of continuity and power that had lost all connections to the real world beyond Imperial enclaves.
But this expenditure of scarce resources on signaling is self-liquidating: the costs of issuing symbolic representations of power consumes the resources needed to sustain the system’s core structures, which then collapse even as the signals continue engaging us.
In summary: the post-truth / post-trust world is self-liquidating, as its synthetic claims of connection to the real world are fake, and the hollowness of its self-referential nature and its rampant overuse exhausts the dopamine cascades’ effectiveness. Drained of authentic cognition and emotion by the ceaseless onslaught of synthetic digital signaling, our engagement withers. We lose interest, become detached, unresponsive, or hyper-aggressive, in either case stripped of the capacity for independent thought or action, just like the mice trapped in Mouse Utopia.
A system that comes to depend on synthetic signaling for its “information” is doomed to Model Collapse, as its signaling has completely detached from the real world.
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