The Truth Is Dead!

Long Live The Truth!

There’s a possibly apocryphal story about Grandma and the Christmas ham.

Dad asks Mom: why don’t you cut off the ends of the ham like Grandma did? The ham tasted so much better.

Eventually, tiring of this endless complaint, Mom asks dear old Grandma why she cut the ends off her ham. What was the great secret? Was it an old country tradition that made the ham taste better? Was it a trick to eliminate some ill-tasting element of the animal?

“Oh no, not at all. My roasting pan was too small,” says Grandma.

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Saturday morning Rose and I were getting breakfast at our favorite Mexican restaurant that sits in the parking lot of a grocery store known, to me, as the $20 onion.

A friend texted me and asked if I knew if the invasion in Iran might have any local ramifications. I worked with ex-military intelligence folks, after all.

I told him to relax. We live in Austin. What, was some terrorist going to go shoot up 6th street?

Sunday morning 3 people were dead. Now 4.

Sunday afternoon I was at Sean’s house. His 16 year old daughter had opinions about what had happened. Our friend Matt was there. He asked what we knew.
Sean was assured in his recounting of what he had heard from a few friends. He had opinions about why we were in the Iranian conflict to start with.

None of us were thinking the same thing or remembering the same memories. None of us were either on the scene at Buford’s or watching the same news outlets the next day.

Truth is what you decide it is. Truth is the channel you choose to believe.

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The past, misunderstood, results in an imperfect today. And the truths we believe often have very little to do with historical factuality, and very much to do with wishful thinking and nostalgia and a longing for a better time that never was.

Since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and then the expansion of cable and streaming channels, not to mention the internet and podcasts and YouTube and Tik Tok, there are a multitude of ways you can get it all, completely, totally wrong.

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To wit:

I have been misquoted nearly every time I’ve been quoted in the press. Either misheard, taken out of context, or misunderstood. While you can say what you will about what that likely says about me, I can’t believe I’m the only one.

Those stories about me make up the entirety of my living self on the internet.

Let’s set aside for the moment the very Black Mirror-esque services promising to keep your social media-powered digital self talking and entertaining long after the tumor in your esophagus gets you.

So now you have a corpus of “objective journalism” built on the misheard phrases of hundreds of thousands — millions — of people.

Extrapolate that through today’s journalistic filter, which is advocacy journalism at the most intentional end and media circus at the other, and today’s objective reality could not be further from the truth, as recorded and published.

LLMs are famously fed on the entirety of the internet whether it’s news, torrents (literal bit torrents - see Meta’s devouring of Anna’s Archive to feed its AI beast) of books, blog posts and social media.

If LLMs have been fed on this as “knowledge,” you have an extraordinarily massive, expensive, and volatile game of Telephone.

Imperfections get enshrined into the corpus of human knowledge like boot scuffs painted over instead of taking the time to stop, kneel, and scrub them out.

The mercurial and regional and wrong and parochial mistakes get hardened into fact, carried along by the new storyteller systems as hard cold data.

Do you want to research an interesting topic? Ask Claude or Perplexity or ChatGPT or Google and they’ll summarize what’s been fed into their neural networks. And if they don’t know the answer, they’ll just make something up, and you’ll never know any better — because who’s going to tell you?

Already we’ve seen malicious actors insert scam phone numbers into Google’s AI news summaries.

Who’s to say, and who’s to guard, what’s truth?

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You don’t have to leave the house anymore.

I think this is what’s destroying society.

Everyone is their own theater, their own community, their own doctor and therapist. You listen to the podcasts that tell you what you already believe. There is no canonical truth. We lost that a while ago, with journalism as entertainment, the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the atomization of media.

There is no town square. There is no water cooler or break room.

Order what you need and some punter shows up in a squalid little Honda CRV to drop off your guide to anti-inflammatory foods and your avocado açaí bowl. Work from home. Home school. Breed kids who live by the time allotted on their iPads.

And so we retreat further into the algorithm-fed bubbles, consuming the content that confirms what we already think, generated by systems trained on a record of the world that was never accurate to begin with.

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At lunch the other day, a very smart fellow asked “Could the blockchain manage canonical truth?”

I know, I know! Imagine putting Sam Bankman-Fried in charge of the tower of Babel and the legitimacy of our historical knowledge.

As a smarter man, Steve Martin, said, “Can I mambo dogfish to the banana patch?”

And now we have billion-dollar systems encoding those misunderstandings at scale, repackaging them as knowledge, and serving them back to us with the confidence of an oracle.

Canonical truth is dead.

If we can’t agree on what’s true today — not yesterday, not in some contested historical record, but right now, in the present tense — how do we even move forward?

Believe what you want to believe?

That’s working out great for us.

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Thanks for indulging this bit of essaying. Back to horror movies and comics and other topics next week.

Nick Tangborn is a 30 year veteran of the intersection of technology and media, with Napster, BitTorrent, Rhapsody, CNET, and other ground-breaking media properties on his CV. He resides in Austin TX and provides marketing and product services to Hall Donovan/Grayline and is now director, content ops, for Rockbot. These opinions have nothing to do with, and are not representative of, Grayline Group, Hall Donovan or Rockbot.

They are, entirely, and wholly, my own dumb ideas.

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