If it was not obvious, the Covid crisis made it clear that we are struggling to understand what the fuck is going on. We don't know which people to listen to and which institutions to trust anymore. Even basic binary questions like "do masks work?" or "does the vaccine stop transmission" have been fought over to no end in the social media battlegrounds. Many intellectuals within the liminal web scene frame this failure of understanding as a "sense-making crisis". Daniel Schmachtenberger describes the term as follows:

"We’ve had a basis for disinformation for a long time. We’ve had rivalrous dynamics for a long time. The rivalrous dynamics are a basis by which we can get ahead by war and by killing somebody else or lying to them, or ruining the commons. But exponential tech leads, with those same incentives, to exponential disinformation [...]"

In the interview above, he then goes on to explain how we need to learn to be better "sense-makers" in order to meet the threats posed by new technology:

"See if you can create enough psychological safety with some people to be able to start exploring ‘What does it mean to actually share information honestly, so that we can make sense together?"

This "do your own research" mentality does not make sense to me as a scalable solution. Doing research is hard and requires deep knowledge in the subject matter – how else are you to trust your judgement when weighting the results of two academic papers that contradict each other? Eventually, you will reach a point where you have to outsource your judgement to someone else – either a professional, an institution or a study. Unless you travel the world and manually count covid cases, you have to trust the organizations collecting this data, for example. Taken to its extreme, "facts" don't exist, and data is never raw and unbiased. The problem is not making sense of the "facts" available, but knowing which "facts" are trustworthy.

Thus, I think a better framing of this sense-making crisis is that we need to find scalable ways to determine who gets to say what in which context. In other words, new legitimization structures.

In the pre-modern world, God was the uncontested legitimization authority – any alternative was heresy. With the advent of modernity, this truth monopoly gradually ceded to institutions like universities and the press. Instead of having one source of truth, a scattered information landscape with many competing narratives emerged.

Within this landscape, newspapers and scientists were allowed (even encouraged!) to contradict each other thanks to ideas such as the scientific method and freedom of speech. But in order to achieve reach, narratives where vetted through various legitimization structures – the scientific community and peer-review in the case of universities, and values like journalistic integrity in the case of newspapers.

We now live in a digital world wherein everyone is a producer. Anyone can pick up a microphone and start a podcast. There is no vetting process for starting a YouTube channel, and no need to peer review your blog posts. This naturally scares the shit out of old media who desperately try to cancel dangerous individuals like Joe Rogan, deemed to have too much influence. Why should people trust him over our prestigious papers? How do people know who to trust in a sea of 5 billion screaming voices?

And lo! We arrive at what Schmachtenberger calls the sense-making crisis. Framed differently, a breakdown of old legitimization structures as we move into the internet age.

It is not the first time this has happened – it's natural to expect friction when moving into a new paradigm. The emergence of the modern world led to the bloody 30 years war, a conflict driven by the breakdown of the Catholic Church as the uncontested source for legitimacy and authority (and later on, the American and French revolutions).

Eventually, the modern world settled into relative peace and stability as organizations like the nation state and universities replaced the power of the church. Which begs the question:

What structures of legitimacy are replacing them now?

I would argue that the most influential legitimization structures today are the algorithms wielded by big tech. The Twitter and Facebook recommendation engines and the search results on Google have far greater influence than all newspapers combined.

One thing that uniquely distinguished Google PageRank from earlier legitimization structures is its decentralization. By ranking pages based on how many other sites linked to them, the original PageRank algorithm created a reputation-graph that gave credibility to sites without relying on any one narrative.

There is a lot to consider when building such reputation systems and a lot is left to be desired. Trust is context-dependent and multi-dimensional, but too often collapsed into "views", "likes" or "follows". But the core idea of the early search engines was admirable – in the same way blockchains enable an economy without it being controlled by a single entity, algorithms enable legitimization without relying on any one narrative.

Unfortunately, our algorithms today have regressed from the original idea behind PageRank and are plagued by a legitimization technique from the last paradigm called advertising.

In the modern world, succeeding in the market meant legitimacy. Newspapers who managed to attract reader gained trustworthiness and reach. There were other, more subtle legitimization structures in play, like journalistic integrity mentioned earlier. Today those structures have eroded whereas advertising has gone supernova.

Advertising is the last paradigm desperately grasping for power, manipulating algorithmic results through means of capital – buying influence rather than earning it. This coupled with the hyper-efficiency of modern algorithms has turned Facebook into the worst propaganda machine imaginable.

In the face of our current world of misinformation and targeted ads, one might dream back to the days where information was safely vetted by a few trustworthy publishing houses. However, I don't think there is a way back – the old institutions are dead and lamenting them serves no-one. Trying to impose legitimization top-down as we used to – through "fact-checking" and blocking people – doesn't work in a decentralized network society (it does "work" in the centralized totalitarian regime of the CCP but we shouldn't use that as our model). Rather than fading into obscurity, the "dissenters" will move somewhere else in the information landscape and call this newly claimed land the "truth".

Instead, the way out of this sense-making crisis is to build better legitimization structures – algorithms that helps determine what and who is trustworthy without relying on centralized judgement. Google PageRank was a step in the right direction, Facebook and the ad-model were two steps backwards. Let's set the course straight from hereon.

Like this article? Consider buying me a coffee ☕️

If it was not obvious, the Covid crisis made it clear that we are struggling to understand what the fuck is going on. We don't know which people to listen to and which institutions to trust anymore. Even basic binary questions like "do masks work?" or "does the vaccine stop transmission" have been fought over to no end in the social media battlegrounds. Many intellectuals within the liminal web scene frame this failure of understanding as a "sense-making crisis". Daniel Schmachtenberger describes the term as follows:

"We’ve had a basis for disinformation for a long time. We’ve had rivalrous dynamics for a long time. The rivalrous dynamics are a basis by which we can get ahead by war and by killing somebody else or lying to them, or ruining the commons. But exponential tech leads, with those same incentives, to exponential disinformation [...]"

In the interview above, he then goes on to explain how we need to learn to be better "sense-makers" in order to meet the threats posed by new technology:

"See if you can create enough psychological safety with some people to be able to start exploring ‘What does it mean to actually share information honestly, so that we can make sense together?"

This "do your own research" mentality does not make sense to me as a scalable solution. Doing research is hard and requires deep knowledge in the subject matter – how else are you to trust your judgement when weighting the results of two academic papers that contradict each other? Eventually, you will reach a point where you have to outsource your judgement to someone else – either a professional, an institution or a study. Unless you travel the world and manually count covid cases, you have to trust the organizations collecting this data, for example. Taken to its extreme, "facts" don't exist, and data is never raw and unbiased. The problem is not making sense of the "facts" available, but knowing which "facts" are trustworthy.

Thus, I think a better framing of this sense-making crisis is that we need to find scalable ways to determine who gets to say what in which context. In other words, new legitimization structures.

In the pre-modern world, God was the uncontested legitimization authority – any alternative was heresy. With the advent of modernity, this truth monopoly gradually ceded to institutions like universities and the press. Instead of having one source of truth, a scattered information landscape with many competing narratives emerged.

Within this landscape, newspapers and scientists were allowed (even encouraged!) to contradict each other thanks to ideas such as the scientific method and freedom of speech. But in order to achieve reach, narratives where vetted through various legitimization structures – the scientific community and peer-review in the case of universities, and values like journalistic integrity in the case of newspapers.

We now live in a digital world wherein everyone is a producer. Anyone can pick up a microphone and start a podcast. There is no vetting process for starting a YouTube channel, and no need to peer review your blog posts. This naturally scares the shit out of old media who desperately try to cancel dangerous individuals like Joe Rogan, deemed to have too much influence. Why should people trust him over our prestigious papers? How do people know who to trust in a sea of 5 billion screaming voices?

And lo! We arrive at what Schmachtenberger calls the sense-making crisis. Framed differently, a breakdown of old legitimization structures as we move into the internet age.

It is not the first time this has happened – it's natural to expect friction when moving into a new paradigm. The emergence of the modern world led to the bloody 30 years war, a conflict driven by the breakdown of the Catholic Church as the uncontested source for legitimacy and authority (and later on, the American and French revolutions).

Eventually, the modern world settled into relative peace and stability as organizations like the nation state and universities replaced the power of the church. Which begs the question:

What structures of legitimacy are replacing them now?

I would argue that the most influential legitimization structures today are the algorithms wielded by big tech. The Twitter and Facebook recommendation engines and the search results on Google have far greater influence than all newspapers combined.

One thing that uniquely distinguished Google PageRank from earlier legitimization structures is its decentralization. By ranking pages based on how many other sites linked to them, the original PageRank algorithm created a reputation-graph that gave credibility to sites without relying on any one narrative.

There is a lot to consider when building such reputation systems and a lot is left to be desired. Trust is context-dependent and multi-dimensional, but too often collapsed into "views", "likes" or "follows". But the core idea of the early search engines was admirable – in the same way blockchains enable an economy without it being controlled by a single entity, algorithms enable legitimization without relying on any one narrative.

Unfortunately, our algorithms today have regressed from the original idea behind PageRank and are plagued by a legitimization technique from the last paradigm called advertising.

In the modern world, succeeding in the market meant legitimacy. Newspapers who managed to attract reader gained trustworthiness and reach. There were other, more subtle legitimization structures in play, like journalistic integrity mentioned earlier. Today those structures have eroded whereas advertising has gone supernova.

Advertising is the last paradigm desperately grasping for power, manipulating algorithmic results through means of capital – buying influence rather than earning it. This coupled with the hyper-efficiency of modern algorithms has turned Facebook into the worst propaganda machine imaginable.

In the face of our current world of misinformation and targeted ads, one might dream back to the days where information was safely vetted by a few trustworthy publishing houses. However, I don't think there is a way back – the old institutions are dead and lamenting them serves no-one. Trying to impose legitimization top-down as we used to – through "fact-checking" and blocking people – doesn't work in a decentralized network society (it does "work" in the centralized totalitarian regime of the CCP but we shouldn't use that as our model). Rather than fading into obscurity, the "dissenters" will move somewhere else in the information landscape and call this newly claimed land the "truth".

Instead, the way out of this sense-making crisis is to build better legitimization structures – algorithms that helps determine what and who is trustworthy without relying on centralized judgement. Google PageRank was a step in the right direction, Facebook and the ad-model were two steps backwards. Let's set the course straight from hereon.

Like this article? Consider buying me a coffee ☕️