The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'hair salon next to a yellow bus.'
When I was maybe 8 years old, a friend on the school bus told me that a blowjob was a kind of hairstyle popular with movie stars. So the next time my mom asked what kind of haircut I wanted, I told her that I wanted a blowjob. Fortunately, she thought it was funny. And I learned that kids on the bus aren't always reliable sources of information.
People on the internet are sometimes just as unreliable as that kid on the school bus was. This is a well-known problem that's led to countless attempts to separate authoritative voices from the nonsense of the masses. For example, Twitter now offers a paid verification service. To be authoritative on Twitter costs $8 a month. I got verified on Twitter today and we'll see if it makes a difference.
Of course, even authoritative voices get it wrong sometimes. Everyone who said lockdowns would stop the pandemic was wrong. So was everyone who said that masks would stop the pandemic. And everyone that said the vaccines would stop the spread of the virus. They were wrong, their pronouncements steamrolled over dissenting perspectives, and the result was catastrophic.
This has accelerated a society-wide crisis of authority that may never be fully resolved. It has also coincided with a massive cash grab by the rich and big corporations. According to Oxfam, "since 2020, the richest 1% have snatched-up almost twice as much as the rest of the world combined." And according to The Guardian:
"The analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings for 100 US corporations found net profits up by a median of 49%, and in one case by as much as 111,000%. Those increases came as companies saddled customers with higher prices and all but ten executed massive stock buyback programs or bumped dividends to enrich investors. ... The Guardian's findings are in line with recent US commerce department data that shows corporate profits rose 35% during the last year and are at their highest level since 1950."
In other words, corporate greed is primarily responsible for the high inflation we've been experiencing. Prices aren't rising out of necessity. They're being driven up by companies already enjoying record profits. I've seen seemingly authoritative voices attribute this inflation to the government's pandemic spending, and these voices are mistaken. As mistaken as that kid on the bus was about blowjobs.
Government officials. Scientists. Scholars. Economists. Journalists. These titles mean something, but they no longer mean what they once did. Now we're seeing so-called fact checking being used by the powerful to silence dissent. When direct censorship is untenable, attaching a fact check to a piece of information is the next best thing.
When the authorities keep getting it wrong and their fact checkers are bought and paid for, it's hard to know where to turn for reliable information. Beyond this, when facts themselves are in question, communication with others harboring alternative facts becomes much more difficult. Segregating ourselves into virtual communities where everyone agrees with everyone else probably won't solve these problems. I'm not sure what will.
One viable path towards solutions involves rethinking incentive structures. Hive does a great job of aligning incentives to produce valuable content. But most other social media platforms fall far short of this. And there's sometimes a difference between valuable content and true content.
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