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Deepfakes And The Decay Of Truth
Norwegian photojournalist Jonas Bendiksen's 2021 book "The Book of Veles" presented a disturbing demonstration of how AI threatens our perception of reality. His fabricated photos and GPT-generated text about Macedonian fake news creators initially fooled even expert photographers.
AI-generated "deepfakes" differ fundamentally from traditional photo manipulation. They're easy to produce with simple text prompts, and they lack any referents in the real world—no original exists that was doctored. As the technology advances, we face a "deepfake inflection point" where forged content will flood the internet.
Beyond gullibility lies a deeper worry: widespread cynicism. As we acclimate to deepfakes, we may begin doubting the veracity of all information. "As deep fakes become widespread," legal scholars warn, "the public may have difficulty believing what their eyes or ears are telling them—even when the information is real." A world of doubt and uncertainty favors authoritarians over democrats.
Section: 3, Chapter: 8
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
When Communication Becomes A Barrier
Charles Cooley argued that greater communication efficiency would expand our influences and broaden our minds. What he failed to anticipate was how extreme media efficiency would accelerate information flow to the point where careful reading and contemplation become impossible.
Today's digital communication has produced four interlinked consequences:
- Content collapses as regulatory and epistemic boundaries disappear
- Technology assumes an editorial role through algorithmic selection
- People streamline their writing and reading to optimize efficiency
- Social media encourages unbounded self-expression while producing envy, enmity, and claustrophobia
The result is a paradox: rather than leveling barriers to knowledge and sympathy, communication itself has become the barrier.
Section: 2, Chapter: 4
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
Mythmaking In The Age Of Information
When all evidence seems potentially fabricated, traditional criteria for truth begin to collapse. Strangeness itself becomes a criterion—the more uncanny a story, the more likely certain audiences are to find it convincing, provided it fits their worldview. "Beauty is truth," wrote Keats, and in a post-objective world, what's most aesthetically appealing to a group becomes their truth.
As information overwhelms us, McLuhan observed, "man resorts to myth. Myth is inclusive, time-saving, and fast." Myths provide readymade frameworks for intuitively interpreting chaotic information flows. That's why bizarre conspiracy theories have gained traction—they function as mythological systems, not factual claims.
Large Language Models may accelerate this trend. By generating content that feels authentic while reflecting and amplifying our biases, AI threatens to further undermine rational discourse in favor of emotionally satisfying but intellectually bankrupt mythmaking.
Section: 3, Chapter: 8
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
The News Feed Revolution
Facebook's introduction of the News Feed in 2006 marked a fundamental transformation in how information flows through society. Before the feed, Facebook consisted of static profile pages that users deliberately navigated between. The News Feed transformed this into a continuous, automatically curated stream of content.
This shift represented Facebook's desire to eliminate what Zuckerberg called "friction" in communication. Posts no longer needed to be actively sought out—they were algorithmically delivered to users. The algorithm made editorial decisions without regard to meaning, selecting whatever patterns of information it calculated would grab and hold attention.
As Zuckerberg explained in a revealing admission: "A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa." This epitomizes content collapse—all information belongs to a single category of "content" competing for the scarce resource of attention.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
The Architectural Collapse Of Media
Before digitization, analog media created an "epistemic architecture" that helped people distinguish between different types of information:
- Different physical forms (letters, newspapers, books, TV, radio) created natural boundaries between types of content
- Specialized devices reinforced these boundaries (you couldn't take photographs with a telephone)
- The physical nature of media imposed natural friction on information flow
- Different regulatory regimes governed different media types
This architectural separation helped maintain communication's human scale by preventing electronic networks from overwhelming people's sense-making capacities. Digitization has collapsed these distinctions, forcing all information through a single channel with a single objective: maximizing engagement.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
Hyperreality: When The Simulation Becomes More Real Than The Real
Jean Baudrillard foresaw how media would transform society into what he called "hyperreality"—a condition where representations of things take precedence over the things themselves. Once everything is reduced to information and communication, the "principle of simulation governs us now, rather than the outdated reality principle."
This transformation occurs through several processes:
- All experiences become mediated through screens and networks
- The virtual world provides more intense stimulation than the physical world
- Our seeking instinct, which evolved for survival, finds unlimited gratification online
- Reality begins to feel dull, slow, and lifeless by comparison
As Baudrillard argued, the hyperreal comes to feel more real than the real: "It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality." The Walker Canyon superbloom demonstrates this perfectly—for many visitors, #superbloom existed more vividly than the actual flowers they trampled to photograph.
Section: 3, Chapter: 9
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
The Censorship of Birth
In 2017, social media platform Instagram regularly removed images of childbirth, categorizing them alongside pornography, threats of violence, and hate speech. When Katie Vigos, founder of Empowered Birth Project, tried sharing photos showing the physical reality of birth, they were repeatedly taken down.
'The female body in the midst of giving birth—blood, pubic hair, buttocks, the image of a baby exiting a woman's vagina—seems to trigger people to report images,' Vigos explained. Women whose birth photos were censored reported feelings of shame, as if they had done something inappropriate.
In 2020, a company created an advertisement showing the reality of postpartum recovery, featuring a woman in mesh underwear caring for her newborn while managing her own physical healing. The Academy Awards rejected it for being 'too graphic,' requesting a 'kinder, more gentle portrayal of postpartum.'
Section: 2, Chapter: 4
Book: Matrescence
Author: Lucy Jones
The Public Interest Versus Private Platforms
For most of the 20th century, media was governed by a bipartite regulatory framework reflecting the distinct roles of different communication systems. Personal correspondence through mail, telephones, and telegrams was protected by the secrecy-of-correspondence doctrine. Broadcasting was regulated by the public-interest standard, which recognized that access to airwaves was a privilege requiring service to the community.
The internet dismantled this framework. When the Supreme Court struck down an anti-obscenity provision for the internet in 1997, Justice Stevens reasoned that the web wasn't like broadcasting since users "seldom encounter content accidentally." This decision exempted internet platforms from public interest obligations while also abandoning privacy protections. The result: a communication system with unprecedented reach operating with minimal accountability to society.
Section: 1, Chapter: 2
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
"It's Not the Media Pushing This Button to Get That Effect"
Scholar Larry Gross argues that television's impact comes not from overt messaging but from the assumptions baked into entertainment:
"It's not the media pushing this button to get that effect. It's the media creating the cultural consciousness about how the world works... and what the rules are."
Gross found that heavy TV viewership narrowed the gap between liberals and conservatives on hot-button social issues. Exposure to the same set of stories week after week, year after year "brings them together."
Gross says, "I always like to quote this line from a Scottish writer, Andrew Fletcher, 'If I can write the songs of a nation, I don't care who writes their laws.'"
Section: 3, Chapter: 7
Book: Revenge of the Tipping Point
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Focused Care In A Crisis-Filled World
In an age where you're asked to care about everything with maximum intensity, the most effective approach is to pick your battles and focus your concern more deeply.
Rather than having 50 million people care seriously about an issue for six hours, imagine distilling that concern into 3,000 people who make it a primary moral concern for a decade.
This means:
- Choose one or two issues to focus on deeply rather than taking on the emotional burden of dozens
- Don't feel bad about setting these boundaries - it allows you to fight your chosen battles more effectively
- Remember that living inside the news feels like being a good citizen but often paralyzes real action
Section: 1, Chapter: 6
Book: Meditations for Mortals
Author: Oliver Burkeman
"Will & Grace" Subverts Sitcom Tropes To Normalize Gay Characters
The hit 1998 sitcom "Will & Grace" featured gay lawyer Will and his straight female friend Grace as leads, with gay character Jack as a flamboyant sidekick. Though criticized by some as stereotypical, the show subverted common TV tropes by:
- Making gay characters central to the story
- Not treating gayness as a problem to be solved
- Showing gay characters with gay friends and community
While Will remained celibate, the show portrayed him as a successful, funny, relatable person who just happened to be gay - a radical step for 90s network TV.
Section: 3, Chapter: 8
Book: Revenge of the Tipping Point
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
The Rules of Representing Gay Life on TV
Scholar Bonnie Dow identified persistent patterns in how gay characters were portrayed on American television from the 1970s through the 1990s:
- Gay characters are only peripheral in stories ostensibly about them. They are foils designed to teach the straight characters tolerance.
- Being gay is presented as the overwhelming problem in a gay character's life, often leading to misery and death.
- Gay characters appear in isolation, never in community with other gay people.
These tropes reinforced a dominant tragic narrative of homosexuality incompatible with fulfillment or social integration. Hit 1990s shows like Doing Time on Maple Drive centered a gay character's struggle, but still portrayed him as an anomaly, a Problem to be Solved. Such shows did little to undermine the assumption that heterosexuality was the necessary bedrock of family life.
Section: 3, Chapter: 8
Book: Revenge of the Tipping Point
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Content Is Not Cargo
Claude Shannon, the engineer whose mathematical theory of communication revolutionized information technology, famously declared: "The semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." In other words, meaning is separate from mechanism—a letter was both a message and a piece of cargo.
This distinction held firm throughout most of the 20th century, but has now evaporated. With the rise of algorithmic content selection and now AI-generated content, machines not only transport information but decide what information we see and even create it themselves. Signal processing has become semantic processing.
When Shannon proposed compressing transmissions by removing redundant information, he assumed machines would do this mechanically. With social media, we ourselves perform this compression, creating abbreviated language and reducing nuance to fit the medium's demands.
Section: 1, Chapter: 3
Book: Superbloom
Author: Nicholas Carr
