The benefit of a state (no pun intended) of complete anarchic freedom, among others, is that there is no central authority, whether deceptively Pravda-like or honest, to set any kind of top-down narrative.
Every piece of information accepted socially and more or less universally as fact would, in theory, emerge out of a consensus-driven view of reality.
The drawback of no central authority that tells the truth and establishes that truth by coercion if need be is that there is no check on the crazytrain, should one emerge, as we have seen in civilization after civilization that descends into madness due to various and usually very complex and opaque factors.
(This is analogous to many of the “benevolent monarchy vs. pure democracy” dilemmas that philosophers have argued about the relative merits of for years and will probably continue doing for years until humans are eventually wiped out through our own more conventional machinations like nuclear bombs or else usurped and extinguished by AI, our latest machination.)
Virtually everyone agrees that a tyrannical and oppressive top-down authority is not good for anyone except those who sit at the top. This is essentially what we fought the American Revolution over, and why I have no kind thoughts for European royalty, most especially not the inbred and degenerate British family that isn’t actually even British — a story for another day, perhaps.
What is less clear is that total anarchic freedom of information, and any other human activity, could ever produce a thriving society, as much as civil libertarians — which I am — might wish it to be so.
It would actually be nice to have an honest authority with integrity to rely on for factual information.
Such a thing does not exist in this current Brave New World, and it may never exist.
When the technocrats who aspire for total domination warn of the dangers of “misinformation” and “disinformation,” they are not wrong.
The problem is that their prescribed remedy — putting the government, the biggest liar in all of world history in charge of deciding what is right or wrong and boosting or prohibiting speech on that basis — is a recipe for totalitarian hell.
So it appears we are between a rock and a hard place.
Deep fakes (actually fake videos, not the “cheap fakes” the Brandon entity’s handlers have been complaining about, which are real videos that they find counterproductive) produced by artificial intelligence are only going to get more and more convincing with time, and the ability of deceivers to achieve their aims assisted by technology will exponentially increase.
If and when AI develops its own will and agenda, the deception will further magnify until we are left wondering whether we can trust any of our senses at all to give us an accurate reading of reality.
Related: This Is What Happens When Institutional Trust Collapses
The Founders, when crafting near-absolute protections for speech into the First Amendment, could not have foreseen what technology would do to the information landscape; they envisioned a pamphleteer on a Philadelphia street corner railing for whatever cause.
Is there a need for regulation of information in the age of disinformation?
If so, the crucial question is: who or what can be trusted to do it?
