Spoofing Truth
In an age of zero marginal cost, infinite lies clear the field for the Big Lie.
In the waning days of Fat Clientism, one of the more ingenious methods the music industry devised to fight file sharing was something called “spoofing.” More elegant than suing college students, they hired companies with names like Overpeer and MediaDefender “to flood P2P networks with bogus files.”
Anyone who was around will remember this. It became impossible to find songs. Every time you downloaded “Hollaback Girl” it would turn out to be 30 seconds of static.
In a 2004 article about the practice, John Hale — a computer science professor at the University of Tulsa — presciently noted that the principle might be used to protect sensitive material well beyond P2P networks. “If you have a secret that gets out there, how do you get the genie back in the bottle?” he said. “You make millions of clones of genies and hope that they won’t find the right one.”
A few weeks ago I attended a panel discussion on Trumpism that named many factors behind Trump’s rise, but technology was not one of them. I understand this bias. Historians and philosophers tend to see technology as a frictionless medium through which nationalism, class conflict, colonialism and other subterranean stresses work themselves out. Hitler exploited a new medium called radio. The Internet is supposed to be like that, only faster.
I’m not ready to accept that. There are ways in which quantity has become quality here that we have not yet fully appreciated. To resort to a Marxist analogy, money is indispensable to capital because it allows the latter to be hoarded beyond human scale. Similarly, technology has only recently allowed content to be created and distributed centrally at a scale that outstrips humans’ capacity for verification. This insight led to “spoofing” — the “Spartacus” strategy writ larger — more than a decade ago.
But remember, P2P spoofers don’t expect you to think that the 30 seconds of static you just downloaded actually is “Hollaback Girl.” That’s not their game. Rather, they hope that after downloading a dozen files full of static, you’ll simply abandon your search for “Hollaback Girl.”
Similarly, the point of fake news is not to persuade, but to anchor and lead one to despair over ever finding the truth. Once truth is hollowed out, irrational factors can fill the void.
This can cut both ways, of course. We can choose to guide ourselves through the darkness with love or fear. With compassion or cruelty.
But this analysis also has more practical implications when it comes to drawing lessons from history. I was struck yesterday by conservative law professor F.H. Buckley’s case against the Hamilton electors. Interestingly — but honestly — he concedes that the Electoral College originally served a purpose when information was scarce. “The voters wouldn’t know much about out-of-state candidates, they thought,” he writes, glossing the framers. “But the electors might, and so we might trust them more than the voters.”
He continues:
That’s obviously not true today, especially with a public celebrity such as Trump. People who voted for him didn’t need to be instructed about his character by better-informed electors.
I would suggest that this is no longer obvious, though I understand why it seems so. For more than two decades, we have taken it for granted that more content leads to a better informed public. I think this is probably true below a certain threshold. But when the content reaches a scale that outstrips — perhaps by design — human-scale capacities for opinion formation, then we need to trust the Electoral College more than ever, deputized as they are to bring deliberation and discernment to their decision.
The Information Age ends when we realize information conceals more than it reveals.
