Can You Fool the Audience?

The future of culture may depend on this question—and the answer is now evident

Unlike a famous rock band, I often get fooled again. When my new boss turns out the same as the old boss, nobody is more shocked than me.

But I learn from my mistakes.

I made my worst judgment errors before the age of 30. But by 40, my track record as decision-maker and forecaster was reliable. And I believe it has improved since then.

So I’ve gotten better at judging people and situations over time.

It helps that I analyze the bad decisions I’ve made in the past. I do this at a granular level—identifying what I got wrong and why.

But I’ve also pursued intensive study of formal techniques for dealing with uncertain or volatile situations (which I’ll discuss below).

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My single biggest source of mistaken judgment has been trusting people without pressure-testing what they told me.

I simply put too much faith in authorities and experts. Or—worst of all—I trusted people who had no expertise whatsoever. (There’s never a shortage of those.)

I wrote about this in an article entitled (provocatively, but accurately): “Every Prediction from My Teenage Years Turned Out Wrong.”

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The good side of this story is the wisdom I gained along the way. I learned to question groupthink, avoid echo chambers, and develop the invaluable skill of contrarian thinking.

When I later studied game theory and social dynamics, I learned that there are reasons why expert consensus is so often wrong. So, for example, when I applied these tools to financial analysis, I learned why contrarian investors often make the most money in the stock market by betting against the dominant trend. But I saw the same thing in analyzing cultural or organizational or political situations.

The final step of my education came from an in-depth study of futurists and big picture social theorists—especially those who understood group behavior and crowd psychology.

I’ve written about some of these visionaries here at The Honest Broker, for example René Girard, Elias Canetti, José Ortega y Gasset, Hannah Arendt, J.G. Ballard, Simone Weil, Arnold Mitchell, Charles Mackay, Oswald Spengler, and others.

I refer you to these essays, which give you a sense of the toolkit I now use when making decisions and forecasts:

• How Did a Censored Writer from the 1970s Predict the Future with Such Uncanny Accuracy? [J.G. Ballard]

• The Future of Big Cities—as Predicted in 'The Decline of the West' (1922) [Oswald Spengler]

• 15 Observations on the Emerging Vertical Dimension of Cultural Conflict [José Ortega y Gasset]

• Twelve Things I Learned from René Girard [René Girard]

• What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt [Hannah Arendt]

• How Corporate America Killed a Lifestyle That Threatened Its Dominance [Arnold Mitchell]

• Why Gregory Bateson Matters [Gregory Bateson]

In some cases, I championed thinkers—Arnold Mitchell is a good example—who had been completely ignored by the mainstream. In other instances, I’ve expressed sharp disagreement with more famous futurists and their ideas—for example, the concepts of the “Long Tail” or “Future Shock.”

I’d like to see all of these essays brought together in a book called Futurists. Maybe that will happen some day—but it’s such a royal pain dealing with publishers. For the time being, all this material is available on The Honest Broker.

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There are many lessons I’ve learned from these thinkers. Today I will focus on just one of these lessons—but it’s very important right now.

I’ve learned that there’s a self-correcting mechanism at work in culture. Just like me, society doesn’t want to get fooled again. So it has developed macro level ways of judging people and situations.

But this self-healing process is almost always hidden from view.

It’s hidden because destructive trends always push to extremes. They capture all the headlines. And they appear most dominant right before the reversal. The level of dysfunction is so extreme, many can’t see the cracks in the foundation.

It truly is darkest right before the dawn.

When wealth and power support the dominant idiocy, this actually accelerates the reversal. Most people give up hope when they see the richest power-brokers in the world working against them—but this is actually the very reason why a backlash is inevitable.

When the reversal comes, the abusive elite collapse with amazing rapidity. As the reggae singer tells us, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

• The Berlin Wall taunts half the world—then gets torn down in a few hours.

• The leaders of the Reign of Terror become its victims over the course of just weeks.

• Hitler is the most powerful man in Europe, but a few month later he kills himself in a bunker.

• Napoleon is crowned emperor at age 35, but languishes in exile on a small island at age 45.

• Caesar conquers the world—then gets stabbed by a whole throng of Senators.

Detail from The Death of Julius Caesar (1806) by Vincenzo Camuccini.

Those are very dramatic moments—involving bloodshed and empires. But similar things happen to businesses, concepts, social trends, fashions, and every other signifier in the human realm.

That’s why all the truly stupid, egregious ideas in human history eventually get replaced by smarter ones. I’ve seen that happen in my lifetime, but this has always happened—and it’s why slavery, colonialism, child labor, human sacrifice, etc. no longer have influential advocates.

Those improvements happened before most of us were born. But the process continues.

We really do get smarter as a species. We learn from mistakes. We rebel against stupidity, even when it’s supported by the rich, the powerful, and the famous.

On some level, we really can say: No, we won’t get fooled again.

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I raise all this because many of you have lost hope in the larger creative culture.

There have always been threats in the past—dumb and banal trends imposed by the crass and the greedy.

But it feels different this time. It’s worse this time.

There have always been manipulative businesses. But they now have intrusive digital platforms with quasi-monopoly power. You simply can’t escape them.

And there have always been bad songs. But today we have hundreds of millions of crappy AI songs dumped on the market—and promoted by powerful streaming platforms for their own financial benefit.

The same thing is evident in publishing, visual arts, media, and every other creative sphere. The scale of AI slop is enormous—beyond anything ever imagined in the history of human society.

And the story gets worse.

• The AI replacement of human creativity is promoted by the wealthiest people and corporations on the planet.

• This tsunami of slop is supported by trillions of dollars in investment.

• The people imposing this on us have the full support of government and politicians. And if any politicians do push back, they get bought off or replaced.

• These same people also control the distribution of culture with their digital platforms—which they have designed to be as addictive and intrusive as possible.

It feels hopeless.

But it isn’t. Let me tell you why.

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A few years ago, researchers wanted to learn if it is possible to turn a lousy song into a hit. They actually tested this with more than 12,000 people.

The researchers created their own music platform, and attracted a captive audience with a special invitation-only membership. The platform allowed members to hear and download new songs.

Users could see a ranking of the most popular songs. And—as you might expect—they listened most often to the songs with the highest ranking.

But there was a trick involved. The researchers wanted to see if they could influence listeners to choose the worst songs—simply by moving them to the top of the ranking.

So they created two groups. Some listeners saw an accurate ranking of the most popular songs. A second group was shown a fake ranking, with less popular songs listed at the top.

So what did people do? Did they trust their own judgments? Or did they trust the system and the (fake) ranking?

This is a key question for anybody who cares about culture. It helps us understand whether you can fool the audience.

Can you control the culture by lying? Can you control it by manipulation? Can you control it by owning the platform?

The results were fascinating.

There were three lessons learned from this study—and I believe that they are extremely important:

1. Yes, the system could manipulate people into downloading and listening to inferior songs—simply by lying about their popularity.

2. But this only worked in the short run. Over time, listeners would return to the better songs no matter what the fake rankings said.

3. The scariest part of the story is that fans who were lied to—given crappy songs and told that they were great—eventually lost interest in all the songs. They listened to less music. They cared about it less.

By the way, this is exactly what game theory would have led to me to expect. When the game is rigged, people lose interest in playing.

The most useful part of this study is that it proved this happens even when people don’t know the system is rigged. Even if they believe the lies, they still feel viscerally or subliminally that the system is broken.

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This is exactly the stage we have reached in arts and entertainment today.

The big organizations, platforms, and institutions controlling arts and entertainment have manipulated the audience for many years. To some extent, this has always happened, but it has clearly gotten much worse over the last decade.

This has played out exactly as my game theory models would have predicted. These organization have enjoyed some short term successes—because that always happens when you operate a high-level scam.

But that time has passed. We have now reached the end game.

The best way of describing the end game comes from Ernest Hemingway. A character in The Sun Also Rises tries to explain how he went broke:

Gradually, he says, and then suddenly.

That sounds like a joke. But it’s an apt description of how these things actually play out. The erosion is slow, and hidden from view—but the collapse occurs very quickly.

Caesar rules the world one day. He lies in a pool of blood the next.

Our cultural institutions are now moving from the gradually phase to the suddenly phase of their decline.

The entrenched culture insiders will now pay a heavy price for their manipulation. And the down payment can already be measured in declining audience interest, poor attendance figures, and disappointing revenues.

You see this everywhere—not just in falling consumption of corporate culture, but also a collapse in interest in award shows (Oscars, Grammys, etc.), and a softening of loyalty in general.

In other words, it’s not just that people are staying home, but even when they’re sitting on their couch they don’t give a rat’s ass who wins the Oscar (or other honors of that sort). Every metric proves this, from TV ratings to box office receipts to name recognition.

If you doubt me, ask ten random people on the street to identify the film that won Best Picture at the Oscars this year.

Even after you tell them it was Anora, they will still give you blank stares.

Then ask them to sing the Grammy-winning song of the year. And—if you really want to befuddle the people on the street—ask them what they think of James.

Yes, that was the novel that won the Pulitzer in fiction—just 15 days ago.

You don’t even get 15 days of fame for that honor nowadays. Maybe not even 15 seconds.

I’m not mocking any of these works. I’m simply pointing out that we have reached stage three in the cultural breakdown.

Audiences have lost confidence in a broken system. So they just walk away. Like me, they have finally reached the level of the rock band that won’t get fooled again.

[“Who did that?” you ask. But I’m not doing that comedy routine today.]

This is actually healthy—because this painful kick in the wallet is the only thing the entertainment and culture industry looks at.

The insiders running the system have a very short window for fixing this mess. I doubt they will take advantage of it. It’s more like they will get ousted or displaced by the rising indie culture.

Either way, a change is coming. And I have a hunch that, this time, the new boss will actually look very different from old one.