Choose your own reality

The internet has a way of changing and subverting everything it touches. Every industry has been, or is in the process of being blown apart by newcomers touting touting on-demand service, targeted marketing, analytics intelligence, and employment models that somehow dodge offering any benefits or recourse.

The information horizon & shared reality

In the year 1200, an average peasant in Europe knew of very little beyond the borders of the place where they lived and worked. Sure, there was probably a lord, and there was some news of what the lord went and did, but the informational horizon was very short and the speed of information was slow. Since then, these horizons have continued to expand, and the speed of information continued to increase. First with print, then with radio, then with television, and now with Twitter. Goings on and happenings in far-off places now happen in real-time on our mobile devices. With that speed and reach comes the exponential increase in the quantity of information available. Do you care about the goings-on in a quaint village in Germany? You can find it in 10 seconds on any computer. Do you want to read about the latest in biochemistry research? Just clicks away. There is so much information that we have to actively choose what we consume, like visiting a buffet stocked with every kind of food. What used to be a shared experience of eating what was put in front of you is now as diverse as the number of people in attendance. The shared experience of reality has subdivided to such an extent that each individual person experiences the external world in a completely unique way, and in-person perceptions are colored by those choices as well. You are no longer a product of place, but of self-selected identity.

The community of geography vs identity

Shared reality is the basis of human community, and with the increasing speed of information, communities grew and grew. Nationalism, for instance, wouldn't be possible without mass communication. For instance, the fascists of the 1930's and 40's used radio as a means of defining a single, nationwide shared reality. The diversification of information sources, and ultimately the internet have invited the creation of niche communities that serve people based on self identity rather than geographic proximity. This is further fed by corporations that co-opt and invent components of identity as a means of cultivating a customer base. This turns into a feedback loop, where people devote their time, attention and money to their chosen communities, and corporations feed those communities with content and profit from sold consumables.

Information filtering and identity as-a-service

Enter social media, which facilitates these identity-based communities through following, subscribing, and liking; verbs which describe the construction of a personalized buffet of information. Equally powerful but less obvious are verbs like blocking, muting, and unfollowing, which form the boundaries between antagonistic communities on shared platforms. In cases where two or more communities are actively in conflict, reporting and screencapping are methods of directing attacks on opposing communities by way of highlighting violations of platform terms of service, harassing individual opposition members, or simply reinforcing inter-group identity. The companies that run these platforms themselves are walking a thin line between allowing enough content to keep growing engagement and keeping advertisers happy. Now, when I say "keeping advertisers happy," that deserves its own explanation.

Is your community on-brand?

When a large corporation decides to pull ads from a TV show featuring a right-wing talking head, what is going on there? In almost every case, it's a calculated decision. The company weighs the social-political alignment of its customers and decides which they can afford to lose. Does this company's customer base lean young and urban? Pull those ads! Does the company rely on rural communities in red states for a lot of its business? In that case pulling ads would cost more business than just staying silent. In some cases where a company's customers strongly skew towards one end of the political spectrum, intentionally favoring their primary community and creating controversy can lead to increased customer loyalty, even though it alienates customers that don't align with the chosen identit(y/ies).

Vertical identity integration

So, what does the future hold? As platforms are forced to make choices about which communities they will and won't host, companies will choose to follow those choices. Television is already trending this way, with channels like Fox News featuring very different ads than channels like MSNBC. There is a good deal of overlap, but I predict that this will continue to wane until each network has a completely different set of advertisers. Every brand will have to choose which identity feed they want to be a part of. In the United States, there are only two super-communities; the Moderate-Left coalition, and the Right-wing coalition. Each of these contains a number of sub-groups, most of which sit in harmony with each other, but some (mostly on the Left, because hey!) have active conflicts with fellow communities in the same super-group. We're seeing new businesses being founded to serve communities that were politically excluded by the existing players. We now have "Gab" because Twitter decided to start banning people who stir up hate-mobs against groups that Twitter decided to protect, and also those who threaten actual murder. Gab is a shithole. But, I see this trend continuing.

The aesthetics of discourse

The old divisions of American politics are now merely aesthetics that various groups and subgroups attempt to display.

Are you pro-business? That's a great aesthetic for someone fighting any attempt at addressing climate change.

Are you anti-war? That's very useful when you're trying to make the case that your loose-cannon candidate DEFINITELY won't start any wars.

Are you pro-woman? That's a clever aesthetic for someone trying to exclude trans women from public spaces.

I feel like this isn't new, but what used to be exclusive to state-level information warfare is now a common tactic, accessible to any internet talking head. To be fair, not everyone engages this way, and those who do are usually trying to push an agenda that would not be palatable if spoken in plain language. A lot of the problem, I feel, is that the people who do engage in this tactic assume that everyone else is as well, leading to this environment where nobody believes what anyone says about themselves if they come from an outside group.

So, where does this road take us?

I believe we'll see the continuation of subcultures becoming more and more mutually unintelligible. Words will mean different things. Memes just won't translate between groups. Think Darmok & Jalad.

Social mobility will continue to drop, as the cities become more and more foreign and unattainable for rural people.

Shipping, supply chain and, consulting industries will get more adept at code-switching between their various customers.

Eventually, we could see two wholly separate internets form to separate and protect real identities from the maelstrom of anons and pseudonyms.

Politics is already basically just a game of who has the bigger population that gives a shit. I do predict a major upset in the political party game though. The Democrats and Republicans both have major internal instabilities. The Republican pro-business wing will switch sides very quickly once climate change starts hurting profits and people start begging for sea-walls. The Democratic coalition could self destruct if the leadership refuses to make space for the interests of millenial voters. Whatever emerges from that shakeup is beyond my ability to guess.

How do we get off this train?

Stop consuming political media that enforces your point of view. I don't mean go watch Fox News. I mean learn nuance. Learn what's really going on, even the parts that are complicated and don't align neatly with what you already believe. Watch more documentaries and less Stephen Colbert. Read more foreign news and less horse-race political coverage. Get off Twitter. Stop caring about what Trump said yesterday. Block all notifications from The Apps. Learn to speak the language of the people who disagree with you. Form relationships with them. Force them to see a real person instead of a stereotype.

Fuck, that's never going to happen. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens when the ocean destroys another major city. Maybe that time people will give a shit.