- So I’ve had a good rant, and linked different styles of the right to the same undermining of our ability to use words to form stable, supple, strengthening sinews. Next bit needs to be: so what? Where do we go from here? It might be enough for a post just to ask that question and come back to it later?
MAIN
Words have been getting a bit of a kicking lately. LLMs are looming in everyone’s vision right now. As a few people have put it (e.g. here, here, here) humans just lost their monopoly on written language to robots that digested everything ever written, Johnny-5 style (OK, not like that).
But the machinery of language has been radically rewiring for decades, as informatics have worked their way into every cell1.
Words are the sinews of social and scientific progress. Informatics has already upended older ways these sinews stay supple and strengthen. It’s also opened us up to human-comms equivalents of distributed denial of service attacks - really nothing more sophisticated than a bunch of people constantly shouting nonsense while others in the room try to think. But it’s been dismayingly effective (climate example in Nature), and LLMs may be pouring petrol on that (see e.g. openAI here, here, also here).
Science (and all other knowledge flavours that accrete around universities) is a still-surviving modernist structure built up layer by layer through argument and counter-argument2, a somehow-functioning mix of reason and chance. Science is struggling. It’s trying to adapt to new tech, or through inertia failing to. It’s shaken by Language DDOS (climate science under attack; ‘sick of experts’; in the U.S., direct authoritarian attacks).
This is all deeply political, of course. Authoritarians want to be the sole source of truth, and twist words accordingly. The internet age suits them just fine. But there’s a lot of weird Venn diagram overlap with its apparent opposite, libertarian truthiness3. See Peter Thiel talking about Eric Weinstein’s term, the ‘Distributed Idea Suppression Complex’. As Thiel puts it, ’The internet has already begun our liberation from the DISC prison… the media organisations, bureaucracies, universities and government-funded NGOs that traditionally delimited public conversation”.
Gramscian cultural hegemony comparisons abound, so that’s nothing new - and I’m not disagreeing that institutions use words to shape reality. What’s striking is DISC’s banality. You can see the same in Musk’s take on Twitter/X:
“Because it consists of billions of bidirectional interactions per day, Twitter can be thought of as a collective, cybernetic, super-intelligence.”
It’s that sufficient-condition “because of” that gets me. Nope, it’s not intelligent because of those interactions. My cup of tea consists of trillions of bidirectional interactions. It has no smarts. This is exactly the same wilful error that Hayekian thinking is often guilty of (more-so than Hayek himself I think) - if you tear things down, a magic fairy dust will ‘emerge’ to replace it. And if you get in the way of that happening, you’re part of the DISC / woke mind virus.
Intriguing that the outcome ends up following the grain of authoritarianism - that can be seen in the targets that both attack. Both have implicit theories of truth that seem so opposite: one sole, all-controlling source versus an emergent, everywhere-truth that no-one controls. But the effect on the machinery of knowledge generation is more or less identical. Compare to the famous Arendt quote from Truth and Politics:
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.”
That italiced chunk applies equally to both flavours of the right I’m talking about.
Let’s not push the parallel too far. Libertarians aren’t into disappearing people off the street for what they say. But that’s why the childishness of DISC thinking is so frustrating - it seems content to enable its opposite.
So that’s the world that LLMs have entered, that we find ourselves in now. The (actually very useful) idea of emergence is weaponised, paving the way for authoritarians to tediously re-prove Arendt over and over, with added trollfarms. To the extent that DISC thinking has a point - knowledge structures are dominated by white males on computers like me, by wealthy global institutions, of which universities are certainly members - they let the actual point go sailing past: addressing this means exactly the kind of ‘how do we get more voices in here?’ thinking most of them seem to loath.
Footnotes
Strictly, informatics is “the branch of study that deals with the structure, properties, and communication of information and with means of storing or processing information” (OED def) so it’s wrong, but short. All other options are horrible e.g. information ecosystem was about the best I could find, not great. Anything better?↩︎
A Bauman point, that one: modernism - “a ‘total’ order to be erected floor by floor in a protracted, consistent, purpose-guided effort of labour.” (Liquid modernity)↩︎
this overlap shows up in other arguments about ‘authoritarian nenoliberalism’ going back to Thatcher/Pinochet/Allende/Stafford, but this language stuff is possibly a different variation, not sure.↩︎
