We have to care about information
We're hitting a very scary point in information.
We have to care about information. Not caring about information is tantamount to giving up – of saying that nothing matters enough about anything. Narrative is living for the next five minutes in the misguided confidence that you understand the world perfectly, in all of it's nuance and weight. Reaching for a sense of reality means we have to be comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, and to keep at it anyway.
Terrence O’Brien
Grok providing this narrative is beyond problematic. If the narrative is all that matters, you want a clear hero to support the prevalent narrative. You make the hero a white IT guy and spread the lie. This builds directly on top of Musk's recent "better than Jesus!" Grok answers.
This is narrative overwriting reality. The hero can't be a fruits seller named Ahmed al Ahmed, with all the cultural weight in that name, according to the narrative. The hero can't be a person of color by that narrative. The hero can't be living simply, selling fruits and maybe barely scraping by financially. None of these things support the idea that Musk is just a natural progression of the correctness of a particular definition of worthiness, with an equally differentiated need to be compensated.
The actions were heroic, so claiming them lends gravity to the definition of worthiness embedded in the narrative. It's twisted to lend gravity to someone who could be a mini-Musk.
This idea of narrative overwhelming reality has been around a long time. It's a facet of gaslighting, which was coined in A Streetcar Named Desire, first performed in 1947. It's a tool in fascism going back beyond Hitler. When we think of cults, this is one of the hallmarks – and it's one of the reasons fascism likes to don the robes of religion. Faith means believing what you don't understand.
The primary difference now is that it's become mainstream, here, where we live and try to make a positive difference for the people we love and care about.
The pathways for narrative to overwhelm reality are multitudinous. It's not just the lie of gaslighting.
- It's leveraging trust – in a personal source, in a service promoted as an agnostic tool, in pattern recognition and wanting to stay in step with a sense of community. The Cambridge Analytica scandal – ten years ago now! – showed just how effective information manipulation could be.
- It's leveraging confusion-heightened emotions and trying to make sense of problems that are being intractable with the pathways we're all told should work, and aren't. People are reaching for ways to clarify the dissonance while still accepting the pathways are true. It all falls into place neatly if it's recognized the pathways are defunct.
- As the systems to overwrite reality with narrative become more robust, it's supported by fear: do or die.
- That AI hype from day one has been a softened "do or die" was a clue that it might be junk.
- The massive economic shifts by the AI bubble, tariffs and unemployment, and distributing more wealth the to wealthy are putting survival central to everyone living in our capitalist society, where even food and shelter are predicated on work that no longer exists.
- All the pain being meted out by HHS/ICE will lead to "do or die". They aren't listening to law, or moral leaders, or society, or community; and our Congress has abdicated authority.
- As Trump courts war with Venezuela, Greenland, Nigeria; and breaking apart the EU so they can "pull" Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Italy, he's putting "do or die" into place on a global scale.
Getting sucked into the narrative can happen to anyone who's not paying attention to information literacy.
That someone fell for it shouldn't be reviled. If someone pushes people to get angry in lock step, creates more lies to support it: there comes a point where it becomes fraud, or a coup, or war crimes.
Our lives are pushed to a level of speed and efficiency that makes information literacy a choice with consequences. The short and medium term consequences indicate that the corner needs to be cut unless you make a hard decision – the priorities are clear and accepted culturally to be work, commute, survival (which might be more work), family, friends. The long term consequences are existential. They include society, humanity, our understanding of our world and the cosmos, whether or not we live on a planet that's in the environmental sweet spot for human life.
We have to care about information.
