114 Comments

The older I get the more I realise that all of the cliches are true. Honesty really is the best policy. And it is often a greater compliment to be trusted than to be loved.

Expand full comment

Huxley says, I told you so. It's like those who manipulate the world, read Huxley and Orwell, and thought, Yah, this is a good idea, let's do that. The older I get, and I won't be getting a lot older, the more I withdraw from the world & the less I know about people, the more I like them.

Expand full comment

Everyone I know who's middle-aged or older thanks God that they're not young right now. That seems like a bit of a red flag for society.

Expand full comment

"...the less I know about people, the more I like them. " You'll have to understand why I won't borrow this; I'll steal it and make it my own. h/t Le Corbusier

Expand full comment

No need to steal it or borrow it. Just use it.

Expand full comment

"Trust-based communities aren’t some impossible dream. ...both online and in the real world." I agree, however, I am not sure that 'online' will ever make that dream possible. The erosion of trust will lead people back to what makes us human: face-to-face interactions, relationships based in reality, interacting with the environment we actually live in etc.

At the beginning of Lent I stepped away from all news and social media; it added nothing of value to my life, but rather ate life's minutes away (see my post Reclaiming your stolen focus https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/reclaiming-your-stolen-focus) I have not gone back and don't plan to (with Notes, substack is starting to slip into the social media field and I am not sure that is a good move for the platform).

Trust may be scarce, but attention is even scarcer.

Expand full comment

I agree completely! Online and digital reproductions of reality are only going to get more and more lifelike and ironically less and less trustworthy for that exact reason. We just have seen a rather extreme acceleration of this phenomenon in the last 2-3 years but it's been steadily happening for over 20 I would say.

And naturally that does lead back to...what's going on in each person's relationship to their actual reality? Most people nowadays literally don't even know their neighbor's name let alone who or how many people live in each place. Are you on a first name basis with a local butcher or clerk at the market or farmers market? Those are becoming questions of importance for me and measures of "connectivity" the way I would like to see it going forward.

Expand full comment

Agree about the Notes feature. I’ve found myself scrolling a lot more and that’s never good for me.

Expand full comment

The education institution is rotten to the core and hasn’t taught kids to think critically for decades. That’s one reason why we are so susceptible to all of this fakery. I truly believe that institutions all depend on the stupidity of the public and it will only get worse. Thanks for writing about an important topic though.

Expand full comment

As George Carlin pointed out, an educated populace does not serve the interests of those who make the decisions in our society. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it."

Expand full comment

Fully agree. To your point: see my post "How to Train Sheeple- A crash course in John Taylor Gatto's educational Machine resistance" https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/how-to-train-sheeple

Expand full comment

You have pinpointed the biggest problem in our global economy and human society. You can't trust money. You can't trust your next door neighbor. You can't trust politicians. You can't trust lawyers. You can't trust what you see and hear. Given the opportunity to deceive someone for personal gain, most people are willing to risk getting caught. This is human nature. The bigger the challenge to deceive, or the bigger the payout, the more people are tempted to be dishonest. It is frightening. Like you said, the answer lies in transparency, respect, and plain honesty. I hope some entrepreneur figures out a way to make money on "truth". I would invest in that "scam".

Expand full comment

what if money only exacerbates the lies and continues to create mistrust? What if a society that was able to transcend the desire for money and see trust and truth in our language and actions as the only necessary currency??

Expand full comment

“The human heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.

Who can know it?”

-Jeremiah 17:9

Expand full comment

Can you use your own words rather than quote scripture?

Expand full comment

God said it perfectly 2,500 years ago.

What else is there to add?

We’ve bought the “people are basically good lie” for far too long? None of us is good, especially me.

Expand full comment

I would also add that “reality TV” rewards this behavior as well.

Expand full comment
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 14, 2023

This article is testimony to a central truth of our time: that in the midst of so much technological progress, there has been little to no spiritual progress. Or, if there has been, we don't hear about it.. The forces of ambition, greed and the thirst for power, fame and wealth seem not to have diminished at all - they are as operative today as they were in the time of Jesus or the Buddha. Now the preponderance of these unwholesome traits are becoming much more deadly, amplified and spread as they are by the advances in digital and AI technology. I bet Mark Zuckerman and others like him have no idea who Hannah Arendt is (to mention one name) - it truly feels as if we are being led into the abyss by a new generation of Hollow Men.

Expand full comment

Well said. This pretty much says it all. What is missing is trust in these illustrations because they are fashioned from lies. The Blues is a respected form of music because it can be relied upon to give us the truth. We can trust it.

Expand full comment

My initial thought was what they had in common were, in fact, lies.

Expand full comment
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 13, 2023Liked by Ted Gioia

It strikes me that it’s only a matter of time till AI gets into the record business. Imagine AI generating a music track that sounds exactly like someone very popular. Imagine it not claiming to be that person, but using a pseudonym that some listeners suspect may be the actual artist. Will listeners be able to tell the difference? Will they care? Or imagine the estate of a deceased artist using AI to release “new” tracks from that artist. Forgive me if I’m late to the party and this is already happening.

Expand full comment
author

By a coincidence, a news story released yesterday states that Universal Music is asking streaming platforms to block AI-composed songs. They have a good reason—AI has a bad habit of plagiarizing music. Google has reportedly delayed release of its AI songwriting technology for the same reason. Too many of its songs are exactly like pre-existing songs. It they tried to commercialize the technology, they would get sued constantly. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2023/04/12/universal-music-ai-songs-dsps/

Expand full comment
Apr 13, 2023Liked by Ted Gioia

I suspect it won’t be long until the AI learns the plagiarism guard rails and avoids hitting them. Think of the music in Schmigadoon or The Rutles (how’s that for two disparate references!).

Expand full comment
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 13, 2023

Many modern pop music hits already sound like every other pop hit, because they are made to the same formulas.

https://themusicnetwork.com/why-do-swedish-songwriters-dominate-the-pop-music-charts/

The KLF figured the formula out long before the algos were sufficiently advanced to make use of it. "How To Have The Number One Hit Single In Britain In 90 Days Or Your Money Back!" (available for free on the internet) is most instructive on this point.

For that matter, Don Kirschner came up with The Archies, because cartoon characters were easier to manage as manufactured pop acts than actual Monkees.

Expand full comment

The ANTIODROMIA of evidence: media turns information into its opposite, evidence becomes so ubiquitous we don’t know where is up or down anymore.

It becomes a mass that can be molded to whatever shape you want, you can derive opposite conclusions from the same set of data.

You cannot digitize trust.

Expand full comment

The only thing I trust is the reality of my own experience.

But even that doesn't always feel real...

Expand full comment

The experience is real, the interpretation may be questionable.

Expand full comment

Written from experience?

Expand full comment

That's all I have to write from.

Expand full comment
Apr 13, 2023·edited Apr 13, 2023

"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made."

Attributed to: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean_Giraudoux

Assuming you can TRUST Wikipedia!

Expand full comment

I recall this being attributed to George Burns.

Expand full comment

Yes - George Burns used variants of it in his act and included it in a 1980 memoire. He's probably the most well known person to do so.

There is quite a bit about this at: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/12/05/fake-honesty/

Expand full comment

Given that the source cited is not exactly scholarly (if it even does contain the quote), I would tend not to trust this attribution without further efforts at verification.

Expand full comment

In 2014 when journalist James Foley was beheaded by ISIS I didn't doubt the gruesome act really happened (I never watched the video). Deepfake tech was years in the future. Today, I read of a video showing a Russian soldier purportedly beheading a Ukrainian and question its reality. Scary.

Expand full comment

You can see this trust erosion at all ages, and especially with younger generations. And I don't blame them! When we talk about trust with them, some have barely entertained that notion due to all the violations of their trust from adults and entities in their lives. And the response I've seen from some is to sever ties with parts of the Internet altogether; stopping the chase for milestones in life, because how can they trust they can build towards these anymore? I really hope we can turn this around.

Expand full comment

Just before moving to France, I tried to switch my phone account to T-Mobile, as it was recommended for European service. I made the mistake of clicking on a Google T-Mobile ad. It was fake, but they were very good. I called the number in the ad and a woman kept me on the phone for half an hour and phished all my info, SSN, etc. She then told me she couldn't switch my account on line and i had to go to a T-Mobile store. Fortunately, I went immediately and found out it was a scam. I contacted T-Mobile and Google, yet the ad remained up for months. Money trumps trust.

Expand full comment

Thanks, great issue, great article. The upside of this is that there's only one way to go: internally. Wr got to Listen to that inner voice (not the automated internal dialogue of the mind, it's the one deeper down) and train ourselves to go with our intuition. It knows. It ain't mumbo-jumbo, it manifests through your emotions, your physical state and gives many clues. That's why all this cluttering of the sources is happening : to make it harder for us to listen.

Expand full comment

It took me too many years to finally realize that humans are more emotionally driven than logically driven. The psyche is like a rider (our conscious mind) on an elephant (our subconscious mind). We like to think the rider is always in control, but the problem is that our elephant wants sh!t and our rider ends up just being the elephant’s lawyer trying to make logical excuses for the elephant’s bad behavior. That’s why we are so susceptible to bad ideas that appeal to our elephant’s dark side.

It’s been a bad spell for truth lately. If I were a rich philanthropist, I’d fund projects to promote critical thinking skills in schools. On the upside, it’s been interesting seeing the Dominion voting machine civil trial unfold. Those lying SOBs! Their morality might be long gone, but at least they’ll probably get a piece of their pocketbook.

Expand full comment