Thread by @antoniogm

My latest for Pull Request!

The Smollett case, which is now going to trial (and which many are selectively forgetting) is a timely illustration of the psychological phenomenon driving us all crazy (and exacerbated by the Internet): cognitive dissonance.

thepullrequest.com/p/on-cognitive…

I open the piece with an embarrassing personal example: I accidentally walked into the women's locker room at a gym years ago. My mental model of the world was utterly wrong, but I somehow rationalized the incoming data before *finally* realizing my error and skedaddling.

My comical example is a micro-version of a much bigger phenomenon: every nation, community or political faction has an organizing narrative that collides often with an inconvenient reality, traumatizing believers who feel severe anguish. Somehow, the narrative must be rescued.

(In the sort of academic nerdery I hope PR readers appreciate, I also briefly summarize the origins of the 'cognitive dissonance' concept to a 50s-era UFO cult, and analogize that crazy story to both early Christianity...and our timeline right now.)

amzn.to/3G3uEAW

The Internet isn’t just a consensus-destruction machine, The neat narratives we cultivate to navigate a messy reality are now under constant assault by contradictory information, and the psychic stress and labor of keeping it all believable is part of what’s driving us crazy.

We’re assaulted by a constant stream of narrative grenades, making us squirm in dissonance 24/7. Those shocks are what cause the ever-increasing number of bifurcations in the metaverse, forking the prior reality into a more narratively coherent one.

https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1461773059187097606

Since the event exists in all narrative bubbles—there’s still some residue of shared reality—each bubble engages in the narrative machinations necessary to reconcile the discrepancy. Eventually, everyone is living in largely divergent realities.

The ‘content moderation’ debate is really about coercing the managers of the metaverse to respect the sanctity of our worldviews, and pause the flood of constant dissonance.

https://twitter.com/NellieBowles/status/1465724183044841473

The thought we can actually reasonably filter (virtualized) reality such that all narrative bubbles remain unperturbed, or worse, that actually results in capital ‘T’ Truth prevailing, is either naively stupid or cravenly opportunistic (or both).

In the rare cases where truth is unignorable, as in the Smollett case, the contradictions are heightened beyond repair. Even the Internet can’t paper over that much reality. Nobody will actually walk their views back though...that would be too painful.

https://twitter.com/ebeth360/status/1465713431596572691

The dangerous thing about the metaverse isn't creating porn-and-video-game-addicted blobs always plugged in. It's creating a world without the dissonance that smacks us with reality, forcing us to turn around and run the hell out of the wrong locker room before it’s too late.