My work in recent years has been strongly influenced by The Social Construction of Reality, a 1966 book by Peter L. Berger (no relation) and Thomas Luckmann, which united a lot of previous ideas into a fairly coherent statement: Almost everything we think we know is mediated by other people. Accepted knowledge emerges from social consensus, including our values and our beliefs about what is or isn't true. I encourage you to check it out, although it is not necessary to follow what I am about to say. For purposes of this discussion, let's just stick with a simple and relatively uncontroversial statement:
Most people care what other people think.
This isn't saying that people are lemmings or that they don't think for themselves. But the social construction of reality happens because people care what other people think. Other people influence us, in ways large and small. I can get more detailed about how this works, and if you're really interested, check out chapter 2 of my dissertation. For now, however, I want to briefly discuss something relatively new.
The physical distance between a person and the sources of their social consensus has been widening throughout all of recorded history, from creation of bookbinding to the printing press to radio to television to the Internet to social media. Once, you were more likely to check your understanding of values and facts against your physical neighbors. Today you go online and absorb your social consensus from a variety of volatile and highly manipulatable sources that can be located anywhere in the world and can lend validation to flights of fancy that are far from harmless. I've written about this extensively (for instance here and in the aforementioned dissertation).
The sources of authority and the keepers of the social consensus have been getting further and further from us, and the latest wrinkle is AI, which has been marketed first as a source of one-to-one virtual friendship (unhealthy enough) and will soon by marketed as collections of interactive virtual friends. It's not social, it's parasocial, but for a lot of people, the same muscle memory applies.
Like it or not, we seem imminently to be ushering in a new age that will be governed by a new dynamic, which I am dubbing "the parasocial construction of reality." Parasocial interactions are those mediated by mass media and "personalities" such as celebrities or fictional characters, in which people imagine themselves to be engaged in a "real" reciprocated relationship with the people on TV or the Internet. The parasocial construction of reality is unquestionably happening to and with us already, in the form of people whose view of reality is shaped by TV networks and online mobs and wildly biased algorithms.
The next phase will arise when a big enough percentage of our social landscapes are captured by astroturf -- fake accounts whose outputs are generated by sophisticated chatbots that act vaguely like people. Enough like people that they start to feel like a social consensus. These parasocial networks will move public opinion, I guarantee it. But exactly how and to where, no one can yet say. I'm reasonably sure it will be nowhere good.
Real ones know that I touched on this outcome briefly in my 2020 book Optimal, but all signs are the reality is going to be weirder and probably more dystopian still. Consider this newsletter a placeholder to lay claim to the concept of the "parasocial construction of reality."Â
I will probably have more to say on this soon, but as I am sure you've noticed, the current just-regularly-socially-constructed reality is already a lot, and I am navigating a lot of challenges that you will no doubt hear more about in due course. Stay tuned.