Reality Distortion Fields
People, Machines and War on Perception
This post is about proliferating and conflicting views on reality, exemplified by the Hamas-Israeli conflict and coverage of it. For more on technological forces changing our view on leadership and daily life, sign up here on Substack. Research notes and updates from my forthcoming book, Perspective Agents, are also posted on Twitter/X.
"It was all a trap, set by a race of beings who could make a man believe he was seeing anything they wished him to see." — Star Trek, The Cage, 1964
Steve Jobs was once described by a colleague, Bud Tribble, as possessing a "reality distortion field" (RDF). Tribble said Jobs' field-building combined rhetorical flourish, indomitable will, and inclination to bend facts to the purpose.
RDFs have been associated with other charismatic leaders able to inspire immense resilience and motivation among their followers. Bill Clinton is one such figure whose influence was equated to the workings of an RDF. His ability to draw people in and make them believe in his vision, even during tumultuous times, represents the quintessential effect of the "field." Adam Neumann and Elizabeth Holmes, the brains behind WeWork and Theranos, have been described similarly to secure investments and inspire confidence, overlooking the questionable foundations of their claims.
RDFs in the Mainstream
RDF's impact on society now extends beyond Silicon Valley leaders and politicians. In a different context, reality distortion fields may seep further into the mainstream lexicon. The power to create such fields, most explicitly seen through cable news pitting Fox against MSNBC, will be in the hands of more people and machines distributing reality-bending information.
We're on the doorstep of a new age where autonomous machines and opportunistic individuals will have an even greater influence in shaping our worldviews. If the last couple of years are an indication, we’re susceptible to distortions of reality to fit our existing ideologies and perspectives.
Coverage of the Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians is a case in point. Following the attacks, the perilous impact of reality distortion became clear.
Disinformation campaigns executed through coordinated social media accounts, grifters, and information operators made verifying actuality exceedingly hard. Tuesday night’s bombing of the Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza—and the fight for the truth surrounding it— is yet another inflection point. Global news outlets, including the New York Times, LA Times, and BBC, were widely criticized for hastily presenting interpretations and opinions as undeniable, verified facts that are still in question.
As with all wars, information operations are a critical battlefront. This time, these take on a new shape and form. Information sleuths can't discern whether war-time propaganda comes from state actors, intelligence agencies, Israeli or Palestinian-leaning advocates, or bots. Content shared is simultaneously real, repurposed from previous war coverage, or purposefully fake.
In one case, a moving image ripped from a videogame called Amra3 was presented as real, circulating through X and other social networks. According to reports, one erroneous Arma3 clip was viewed three million times on TikTok.
It's not just content manipulation but coordinated efforts that get it into the digital bloodstream. According to NBC News, researchers uncovered a propaganda network comprising 67 accounts on X (aka Twitter). Previously engaged in benign discussions, these accounts switched to posting synchronized, misleading content about the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Wasim Khaled, head of narrative intelligence firm Blackbird.AI, likens such coordinated efforts to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on human perception. Similar to cyberattacks meant to shut down a machine or network, such coordinated efforts are intended to distort perception, making ground truth inaccessible.
The surge of misinformation on X and elsewhere overwhelmed journalists and fact-checkers trying to make sense of horrors on the ground. An open-source intelligence (OSINT) researcher, Justin Peden, pointed out the stark contrast below from previous experience where credible sources were better known and verified. He said on X:
Such rampant misinformation has redirected experts from real-time conflict verification to debunking aged and extremist content.
Emerson Brooking, resident senior fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, highlighted how specific platform changes have indirectly facilitated these distortions. He told Wired: "Changes in profit and incentive structure mean that there's a lot more tendency for people to share at high volume information, which may not be true because they are trying to maximize view counts. Anyone can buy one of those little blue checks and change their profile picture to something seemingly a media outlet. It takes a lot of work to vet who's telling the truth and who's not."
Data Traces Distort Coherence
One of the better takes on the challenge came from
writer Ryan Broderick on what an unmoderated Internet looks like. He notes the exodus of trust and safety staff fighting back against nefarious or harmful content on social media sites is to blame.Our research suggests there’s another systemic factor at work. McLuhan noted that every medium or technology brings about a transformation in how humans perceive and experience their world. In this case, an alteration of perception is caused by states, social media warriors, outraged citizens, and machines propagating both truths and lies.
McLuhan stressed that technology doesn't just shape our ideas or beliefs, but rather, it shifts our sensory experiences and perceptual frameworks. He noted the effects of technology don’t occur at the level of opinions or concepts but alter perception subconsciously. This happens steadily and without resistance.
Through this lens, our teams study the structure of digital media with a view to the potential effects of changing incentives and sources we use for news and information. If anything, this depiction of the effects below is solidifying right before our eyes.
Consider the predominant media forms seeding information chaos from the Middle East. The story (if you can call it that) takes form through a vast database of disconnected digital files (instead of a neatly packaged storyline seen in a magazine or a TV segment). By pulling relevant fragments from the “database,” with enough diligence, anyone can assemble and construct a credible reality. This shift in form (the ability to self-construct truth versus relying on verifiable stories) fundamentally changes perspective-building.
In aggregate, news shared through digital networks is synthesized by way of tweets, visual loops, location-specific Telegram posts, and more. This sheer volume created, filtered through algorithmically powered databases, is too much job for human verification. We urgently need new ideas and tools to manage the scope and scale of tens of millions of digital files—and ideologies—propagated around major events.
Distortion That Scales
The limits of imagination can't bind RDFs to the specter of conflict. Automated agents will supercharge field-building. These machines work at the speed of light, can generate propaganda at scale, don't have a conscience, and never tire.
Generative AI holds promise for new tools that circumvent information chaos or perpetuate it. In the near term, analysts worry that the looming specter of automated agents will reshape political persuasion next year. They believe automation fused with 1:1 personalization will amplify microtargeting used in political campaigns since the early 2000s. Mirroring advertising that uses data to craft personalized ads, political agents may monitor and sway hundreds of millions of voters individually.
Imagine these political agents using advanced language models akin to ChatGPT to conjure tailored messages across texts, emails, and multimedia, fine-tuned for every voter. In contrast to the finite ad sets curated by advertisers, this system can produce an inexhaustible variety of unique messages. Whereas advertisers strategically place a relatively small number of ads, language models such as ChatGPT can generate unique personalized interactions in the millions throughout a campaign.
We may see political theater where the brawl isn't between human strategists but between automated behemoths. The result of the 2024 elections might come down to competing agents, the winner being the party of the more adept AIs.
Seeing Through the Fog
The assault on our perspective brings us to an existential question: How do we maintain our sense of self and purpose in an age where our realities can be effortlessly distorted?
There is no easy answer to curb the effects of reality-bending practices, but we can uplevel critical thinking and personal resilience. Our greatest defense against any RDF is an informed, questioning, and adaptive mind.
This defense requires work. Just as one might weight train to withstand physical challenges, we must prepare our minds for the onslaught of change and the myriad of agents fighting for our attention.
Central to this endeavor is the cultivation of techno-media literacy. A grounded understanding of how new technologies work can offer an invaluable shield against manipulation. When we grasp the underlying use cases, we become more adept at discerning the integrity of the analysis we review.
However, more than merely literacy is needed. In a world where echo chambers are a click away, diversifying our information sources is essential. Relying on a single news outlet or social media feed creates a myopic view of events. Unconventional sources like vetted OSINT accounts, intelligence services, and real-time monitors can augment and/or replace real-time news generation from incumbent brands.
As we diversify our sources, we must resist knee-jerk reactions to what we see. Clickbait headlines and emotionally charged videos by design are intended to get us to share content, often obscuring the real story. Delving into the entirety of a story, rather than skimming its sensationalist headline, is a simple yet effective way to ensure we're not inadvertently spreading disinformation.
The most insidious challenge we face is our own biases. The tendency to seek out and believe information that aligns with our pre-existing beliefs is a silent saboteur of objectivity. By actively challenging ourselves to venture outside our comfort zones and interact with content that may not align with our worldview, we bolster our defenses against cognitive pitfalls.
As reality distortion fields engulf us, we must be proactive, not reactive. In Poor Charlie’s Almanac, Charlie Munger’s central theme is “Prepare Ahead.” He says, “The only way to win is to work, work, work, and hope to have a few insights.” That requires we resist the impulsive bias to act on what we see. We need reflection — and distance — from the torrent of real-time information that shapes our perspective and decisions.
We are on the cusp of a revolutionary shift in our perception of the world. The days ahead promise a mix of incredible discoveries and catastrophes. Our psychological preparation will determine if we see things as they are or get lost in the swirling vortex of distorted realities.
"Our greatest defense against any RDF is an informed, questioning, and adaptive mind." This. This is the antidote and it starts at home. Ponder, who has the incentive to teach children how to think critically? Who prefers and benefits from future generations inability to think critically? Who prefers a populous of dopamine addicted scrollers who are soon to be brain-chip enabled with infinite hot-quips. (sorta like this one)
In 1841, three years before Samuel Morse's famous "What Hath God Wrought!" telegraph measage. Edgar Allen Poe published his short story, "A Descent Into the Maelstrom," recounting the disastrous fate of a whaling ship unable to escape the upside-down tornado in mid-ocean. All except for the sailor narrating the story, who survived by noticing that in the midst of the chaos it was still possible to rise to the surface. Marshall McLuhan often used this metaphor to describe our "modern" lives and our own potential path towards saying alive in a paradigm-vortex . . . !!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Descent_into_the_Maelstr%C3%B6m