Post Factum
How the truth rate went negative.
In the run up to the election, we saw an unprecedented spate of “whither truth” think pieces, a form originating — in recent times — with Stephen Colbert’s coinage of the neologism “truthiness” and the appearance of Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, both in 2005, the midpoint of the Bush presidency.
Granta ran a representative hand-wringer, blaming post-modernism for chipping away at the mortar of objectivity, making way for right-wing barbarians to topple our institutions with no more than hot air. I think this is interesting — and worth further exploration — this idea that the right co-opted the language of critique in the service of reaction, but such accounts seem to me to be insufficiently materialistic — practically dreamy in their romanticism, with all their moral compasses and accountability talk. Talking to the taxman about poetry. For certainly if truth has become devalued in our market economy, it must be due to market — rather than moral — factors, no? William Davies came close to the kind of market analysis I’m talking about in the New York Times.
The problem is the oversupply of facts in the 21st century: There are too many sources, too many methods, with varying levels of credibility, depending on who funded a given study and how the eye-catching number was selected.
So the supply of facts has exploded, but why exactly? What are the market factors? I think there are three.
LOWERED BARRIERS TO ENTRY
Barriers to publication and expression have of course been lowered by digital media, which is a good thing, but — in this cycle in particular — it seemed that the threshold required to count as “true” was itself lowered. This is arguably a function of oversupply, and in particular the rise of misinformation sites — akin to the flooding of the market with counterfeit goods. This will, of course, damage the value of the real articles, cause consumer confusion, and some will decide these impostors are “good enough.” But this is a side effect of supply, not an explanation for it.
NEGATIVE MARGINAL COST OF GETTING IT WRONG
In a mildly competitive information marketplace — kept mildly competitive by high barriers to entry — “getting it wrong” had (in aggregate) a marginal cost. Your competitors could use it against you to steal your audience and, thereby, your revenue.
One could argue that in today’s hyper-competitive information marketplace — with no barriers to entry and a low likelihood that the same reader will read your claim and the correction — the marginal cost of getting it wrong has fallen to zero, or — worse — gone negative, like interest rates. In such a world, the value of truth telling becomes economically inverted, generating an accelerating misinformation loop. This is the story of the widely-circulated New York Times innovation report from a few years ago. The paper had been blind-sided by the fact that generating reliable journalism was insufficient to remain competitive when the marginal cost of getting it wrong approached zero.
Perhaps we don’t appreciate the extent to which economic factors, in yesterday’s more homogeneous media environment, accidentally incentivized accuracy in a way that is no longer the case. We mistook grace for virtue.
DEMAND
Finally, the removal of constraints through the factors above sets the stage for the oversupply of truth that Davies describes. But what drives this supply is, in fact, demand. Demand from whom? Media outlets will say it comes from their audience, of course, but I would argue that it comes from the business models of those outlets, which demand constant revelation, an unending supply of new “truths.” This is a perverse update of the planned obsolescence of the 1950s auto industry, now de-risked — even incentivized — by the negative marginal cost of getting it wrong, which is negative — in part — because getting it wrong allows for new “truths” to emerge, whereas a final truth would actually lock the system up like a stalled economy.
Imagine this: A cable network is offered the ability to settle a controversial matter once and for all. Through a mechanism currently unknown and unimaginable to us, they receive the ability to broadcast evidence to settle some matter that will immediately be accepted as indubitable by everyone — an epistemic magic bullet.
Would they broadcast it? Would the ad department let them?
