(2021-01-24) Torenberg Reality Is Up For Grabs

Erik Torenberg: Reality is up for Grabs. Whatever your perspective is on the broader culture war, one thing is clear: we've lost our common sense of reality.

While the internet has democratized information sharing in a way we never thought possible, it did so at the expense of a shared alignment on, well, anything.

The problem isn't that we're arguing about morality or ideological differences, it's that we're arguing about the nature of reality itself (nature of truth)

Mike Solana aptly describes this connection to history as a tether — something that keeps us grounded in our shared sense of what's real and what's not. (religion)

While we used to cohere around shared experience of watching the same (mass media) TV channels, reading the same newspapers, and listening to the same radio stations, our niche outlets further fragment our now non-existent communities.

Print media was a forcing function to move forward, enforcing a culture of progress. Since we recorded history in books, the general sentiment was about adding to the collective knowledge-base, not subtracting.

These days, however, we've been given the power to edit the past. As Solana says, "Information online is malleable, ephemeral, and nonlinear.

what really sets the internet apart from print is the speed at which digital information changes

To be sure, to say that we ever had a real “shared reality” would be incorrect. We had a shared illusion (social fiction), a simplified version of reality that Walter Cronkite truncated for us.

It seems like the move to private membership communities is a sort of scramble to find one's reality territory in what feels to be a "new normal." (social warrens)

While some would just call this "community building," what we're seeing today is not just people aligning around shared values, but instead a shared understanding of the world around them.

we could look at content creators as seed-stage "reality entrepreneurs," and their "fans" are consumers of — and investors in — the entrepreneur's model of reality. (filter bubble)

A friend of mine calls this kaleidoscope theory

Twitter makes you think we're living through the French Revolution, but meanwhile most of us are staring at our phones typing away about something we've yet to—and probably won't ever—experience. And with no mechanism or infrastructure to adjudicate between competing realities, we're left in a position where these realities are not interoperable.