(2025-03-06) Taylor A Propos Current Events

Dorian Taylor: À Propos Current Events. A survey of one small aspect of the current (geo)political situation, and what I'm doing about it.

I am slated to present at the Information Architecture Conference in Philadelphia on May 3rd. The talk is about my work over the last several years creating information infrastructure for strategic planning, situational awareness, and organizational memory. (Sense Atlas)

In response to the US president’s continued threats on my country’s sovereignty, I will not be entering the United States for this conference. If any of you are planning to attend, I am working with the organizers to present my talk remotely

18F Got DOGE’d

18F, the US government’s elite internal tech development agency, was fired en masse by midnight email the other night, a move characteristic of one Elon Musk

As many people more familiar than I with 18F have remarked, these were the people who were genuinely making government more efficient - that is, what Elon Musk is disingenuously pretending to do

Corrupted Epistemology

Kate Starbird, who last week presented on behalf of her lab at the University of Washington’s annual faculty lecture

She goes over the arc she and her colleagues took, from researching rumours, to election interference and pandemic conspiracy theories, to January 6th and beyond

her work deals with the following typology of concepts

• Misinformation, which is simply any information that is false or misleading, irrespective of intent or mechanism,
• Disinformation, which is misinformation uttered on purpose,
• Lying, the concept we have all been familiar with since childhood,
• Bullshit, a concept recovered as a technical term by the late philosopher Harry Frankfurt

I suppose an expanded lexicon could include terms like dissimulation, propaganda, and even fake news, but I feel like the bulleted concepts represent the core.

Dr. Starbird posits that the kernel of this dynamic is the rumour which she defines as an unofficial story, spread through informal channels, that contains unverified - though not necessarily false - information, for the purpose of “collective sensemaking”. The function of rumors, through the lens of mass psychology, is to alleviate the anxiety that comes from the uncertainty and ambiguity of a situation.

Her team found in these dynamics, that contrary to their hypothesis, the truth does not in fact prevail

Dr. Starbird considers a dual structure of claims and frames: reports of events and the mental contexts through which they are interpreted. She speaks of how the participants in these dynamics develop a “corrupted epistemology”: viewing all new information through a lens of distrust and conspiracy

In other interviews she has signaled moving away from a framing of misinformation and disinformation, to considering an alternate information ecosystem with its own separate reality.

She actually said “facts”, but I like “claims” better because it’s about what people say about things happening, whether or not the thing actually happened. Plus, it rhymes: claims and frames.

This right-wing (dis)information ecosystem is highly participatory, per Dr. Starbird: “improvised collaborations between witting agents and unwitting though willing crowds of sincere believers”.

It’s a free-for-all improv theatre with all sorts of incentives for various actors to participate, from individual curiosity-seekers, to media personalities, to hostile state actors

The right-wing disinformation ratchet operates as follows... (Not just right wing?)

The rest of the media ecosystem, by contrast, still adheres to a top-down model of broadcasting polished and vetted messages

Dr. Starbird finishes her lecture with an exhortation to “rage against the bullshit machine”, to “build the infrastructure to counter this bullshit machinery”

I see a number of complications with this plan. For (I paraphrase) teachers to keep teaching, researchers to keep researching, and journalists to keep reporting, we have to recognize that it is no longer a given that these erstwhile uncontroversial activities can continue unmolested. These societal roles specifically are now under constant siege, and the people carrying them out need not only their livelihoods protected, but also their physical safety.

In her post-lecture interview, Dr. Starbird remarks that the University of Washington supported her in a manner that Stanford (vis-à-vis SIO) ostensibly did not.

On its face, fighting back against the right-wing bullshit apparatus amounts to a massive collective action problem - the very kind, with some adjustments, that said apparatus is great at mobilizing. So step one is to copy them. They have an advantage, though, which I find troubling: they don’t have to worry about reality.

I have a hypothesis about why these people mostly don’t need to worry about reality: it’s that reality doesn’t matter nearly as much as you’d expect it to.

Many mistaken beliefs are simply not acutely deleterious enough - at least on average - to make a person stop believing them, and promulgating those beliefs to others. This, I submit, is how flat-earthers and anti-vax movements, cults and conspiracy theories, can continue to survive

There’s a monologue by the historian Jacob Bronowski that I revisit from time to time, in which he asserts that war is a uniquely human activity with no analogues in nature, and should be understood not in terms of obligate predation or defending a nesting territory, but as “a highly planned, and cooperative form of theft.”

This is what I see in the subscribers to the Bullshit Improv Theatre: they perceive themselves to be at war. The conspiracy theories are just a pretext for plunder.

What makes this war unusual is that it the territories are not cleanly delineated. Both sides occupy the same cities, live in the same buildings - even belong to the same families. As Marshall McLuhan remarked, “World War III will be a guerrilla information war, with no divisions between civilian and military participation.” This is where we’re headed as a civilization, if we aren’t already there.

belligerents fighting on the side of Bullshit are not strongly committed to their targets. Again, war is theft, and they’re only participating because they want (and expect) a windfall.

I think it’s possible to get at least some of them to turn on their leader, if you can attribute to him (and this is important) acute harms that can’t be plausibly explained away, even by master contortionists. Consider:

• Trump take egg
• Trump crash plane
• Trump break stonks
• Trump take job

On the subject of kings, the slogan NO KINGS is also eminently succinct and has plenty of purchase from Maine to Alaska. Even the trend of just calling them “weird” was working until some milquetoast campaign strategist convinced people to stop.

attacks on them are necessarily, or at least nominally, constrained by the law. This doesn’t, however, mean that you can’t still make their lives miserable. If you have money, for instance, pull a Peter Thiel and fund somebody’s lawsuit against one of them. I’m sure there are plenty to choose from. If you own a restaurant and one of them shows up at it, loudly and publicly kick them out

The other thing to do, is to constantly drum the message at them: You will lose; there are more of us than there are of you. Use data and evidence to prove it.

The final component, the one that I am concerning myself with, is a technical solution. In an ocean of bullshit, it is essential to be able to tell good information from bad.

A couple years ago, I received a grant to reshape a bunch of work that I had been doing for years in and around a thing I called dense hypermedia, into what eventually became the application server Intertwingler.

The purpose of this piece of infrastructure, now that I’ve had some time to reflect, is to make it possible for people to understand more while having to read less;

It’s a tool for collaboratively attacking so-called wicked problems, like the kind you normally see in the analysis and design of products and of policy

The tool I created manages this collaborative process, and the resulting structure has many benefits for resource planning, policy analysis, and design rationale. As stated, though, this is just the germ of the system, and I have ambitious plans for both the tool and its substrate.

More to the point, though, the tool is really just a slim prosthesis for an idiosyncratic human process, and thus requires some essential training and support to use correctly.

should also add that Intertwingler is open-source and relies heavily on open standards, and the tool itself is designed to be completely transparent with its data

As such, my business plan to commercialize Intertwingler (or rather the as-yet-anonymous tool running on top of it), is to put it at the centre of my consulting practice, which you can understand as a kind of strategic resource planning and system design.

I can also see, in the very near future, donating instances of the tool and concomitant training services to civil society organizations. As the tool matures, along with material on how to use it, I intend to spin it out into a stand-alone product.