Fiat Money, Fiat News
January 4, 2017·4 comments·big data
The distinction between fake news and fiat news has collapsed into a single category in the public mind. Yet they operate through entirely different mechanisms, create different dangers, and require fundamentally different responses. When institutions lose authority to police information because they themselves are the primary architects of information distortion, something breaks in how democracy functions. What emerges in its place may not look like authoritarianism, but the cage is no less real.
- Trust in information has inverted itself. Citizens no longer evaluate news on whether it's true or false, but whether any institutional source can be relied upon at all. This isn't paranoia. It's rational response to watching mainstream institutions deliberately shape narratives for stability and status quo preservation.
- The problem isn't counterfeit news. It's that legitimate news institutions have normalized strategic distortion.When the Fed uses "communication policy" and the Washington Post slants coverage for institutional benefit, they've devalued all news equally. Citizens can't distinguish good information from bad anymore because the currency itself has been debased.
- Gresham's Law applies to information. Bad money drives out good money from circulation. The same happens with news. When you know some news is strategically constructed, you stop trusting any news, even the truthful kind. The incentive to seek out or share genuine information collapses.
- Technology platforms are becoming the arbiters of what counts as acceptable information. Facebook's fact-checking partnerships with established news institutions will do little to police fiat news distortion and everything to entrench it. The real gatekeepers are companies with no obligation to democratic values, just engagement metrics.
- The wolf trap has been built and the wolves are already inside. The infrastructure for curated information control exists now. The question isn't whether it will be used, but how extensively. History suggests it will expand until information itself becomes unrecognizable as a force for informed citizenship.
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