You are reading the second issue of this newsletter. Congratulations for being one of the first 79 subscribers to this thing. And thank you! If you enjoy this newsletter, I hope you’ll share it.
Let’s start with a question for you.
Why do you live where you live?
Story time! Many years, I was driving cross-country to my new life in California. Unfortunately, my car was mortally damaged by a flash flood in the hamlet of Merkel, Texas. I ended up stranded in nearby Abilene for a few days while I figured out who in town, if anyone, could replace a Volkswagen GTI engine.
Abilene, at least the part I was stuck in, felt like a town that had seen better days. But people were super-friendly, so conversation was easy to come by. And I’d always ask them, free of judgment or expectation, why do you like living here?
People’s stories were generally dispiriting. I couldn’t find a soul who’d offer me a positive reason why they lived in Abilene. Almost all of them claimed to be “stuck” there, whether by financial, family, or other obligation. (The population of Abilene has grown quite a bit since then, so clearly it’s a region of certain merits.)
It turns out, staying close to home is very normal. In the USA, which defined the concept of social mobility, most people don’t venture far from the place they spawned into existence. According to an analysis by the US Census Bureau and Harvard, fewer than 20% of adults settle more than 100 miles from home.
It’s a personal question that doesn’t get asked enough: Why do you live here? How did you get there? Why do you stay?
So I want to hear your story. Why do you live where you live?
Email me (or leave a comment) and tell me how you wound up where you are, why you still live there, and how long you think you’ll stay. I’ll print your response in the next issue. (You can use your name or remain anonymous. I’ll ask first.)
And if you’re a map and stats nerd like me, I recommend losing yourself in the interactive maps on this page. It shows where people migrate for each metro area, both outbound and in.
Navigating our rapidly decaying information environment
Last weekend in Oxford, UK, hundreds of people assembled to protest… 15-minute cities.
It wasn’t great to see.
For those unfamiliar, the “15-minute city” is an urban planning concept, and not even a particularly new one, in which any citizen can handle their routine chores within a 15-minute walk or bike ride of their home. This rethink of transportation and zoning should deliver benefits to both the individual (more free time) and society (less pollution, healthier lifestyles, fewer traffic accidents).
To these protestors in Oxford, however, 15-minute cities are another conspiracy to enslave humanity.
Debunking this kind of absurd fantasy is useless and beside the point. (If you want an explanation on why Oxford became a flashpoint for this fresh new conspiracy theory, here’s a pretty good one.)
The larger issue is that a significant percentage of people in the world now get their information from sources that exist within an extended fantasy universe. These sources don’t deliver information, as much as they do confirmations of their underlying narratives. The 15-minute city protest is just a tactical outcropping of deeper fantasies and conpiracy theories, often with anti-Semitic roots. (The World Economic Forum — WEF — recently joined the Conpiracy Legion of Doom alongside George Soros, the Rothschilds, the Bilderbergers, the Deep State, and other “globalists” wink wink.)
This is much deeper than “misinformation”
People who analyze this sort of thing tend to focus on misinformation. They just don’t understand what 15-minute cities are! Let’s just explain it, and they’ll come around.
But this is like blaming McDonald’s for climate change.
I used to be in the middle of this fray. I worked on News and Publisher marketing at Facebook, in 2016-17. Shortly after I arrived, the world got Brexit and Trump, both of those events supported by “fake news.” Before Trump co-opted the term, “fake news” meant fictional stories that were designed to look legitimate. Sometimes these hoaxers proudly boasted about how many people they could fool. The hoaxes succeeded because they confirmed the popular narratives that were ignored or disputed by anyone earnestly reporting factual events.
There’s a larger issue at work here, which is that people don’t trust anyone anymore. Faith in nearly every instution has fallen. And… maybe our trust was always misplaced! In a capitalist, democratic society, everyone is essentially working for themselves. Politicians want to win elections. Corporations want to increase return on equity. TV news producers want to deliver audiences to advertisers. Your preacher needs the collection plate to overflow. Your plumber is trying to put his kids through college.
More sunshine always reveals what was hidden. It’s no concidence that trust in the police declined once citizens had the technology to record and share their real interactions with them, and show how often they contradicted what the police reported to the local media.
So let me ask you this: Do you trust the media?
Almost everyone has the same answer to that question, and that answer is “Some of them.” A lot of Republicans, for example, will claim they don’t trust “the news media,” but will faithfully consume, believe, and process content from the biggest news media outlet on TV, Fox News. And ratings and trust in Fox News will likely be unimpacted by emails and text messages that show their producers, executives, and top on-air talent knowingly lied to their audience.
(Close to 20% of Gen Z are going to TikTok first for breaking news, which is very bad, and not because “China.”)
So… whom do you trust? And how did they earn that trust?
Major national publications have written about companies and projects I’ve worked on. And sometimes they’ve gotten the story very wrong. Yet I keep reading those publications and generally believing them. That doesn’t seem very smart on my part.
I’ve fallen for disinformation, too. So have you. Many times. It could have been a badly out-of-context quote that mischaracterized someone, or a misrepresentation of the content of a state law. Why do we fall for this stuff? Because it aligns with what we already believe.
But ultimately whether 15-minute cities are a legitimate urban planning vision or a conspiracy by rich Jews to reduce people to chattel is beside the point. The bigger issue is that we all live within narrative universes of our creation, and it seems like the people who live in the most destructive Dark Fantasylands are organizing.
Diagnosing brainworms
Have you heard of Kristina Karamo? She’s the new chair of the Republican party of Michigan.
Karamo speaks at Q-Anon conferences. She sees the influence of mythical beings everywhere, accusing Beyonce and Billie Eilish of Satanism. She also says that yoga is demonic. She now runs the Republican party for the nation’s 10th-largest state.
But…how unusual are these beliefs? In fact, 61% of Americans believe in the Devil. Now, how many of them believe Satan is possessing souls through yoga or Beyonce? Probably fewer.
Belief in demonic influence is a rich religious/cultural history that goes back centuries. We’re not going to try to debate the existence or influence of the Devil in this post. Instead, we’ll compare it with a mythical belief that’s a little more recent.
On January 6, 2021, thousands of people amassed in Washington, DC to protest the certification of the 2020 election, based on Donald Trump’s lie that the election had been rigged.
Well before the election, many people confidently and correctly predicted Trump would claim exactly this, and that he would take extraordinarily, unprecedented measures to remain in office after losing.
Millions of Trump’s most feverish supporters easily fell for the con, and a few thousand of them showed up in a frenzy on January 6th. American democracy almost ended that day.
Even after dozens of court cases, vote audits, and official investigations by Trump-supporting public officials, it’s provably clear that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. Republican leaders have burned millions of taxpayers’ dollars trying to prove otherwise, and the best they can do is bury the results.
To this day, a majority of Republicans still believe the fictional narrative of voter fraud, in no small part because Fox News and conservative alt-media repeated it so many times. But this is only one of many fictions and fantasies floating in the polluted rivers of international information environments.
Since 2016 or so, we’ve seen a new pop psychology word arise: brainworms. This is an international, highly derogatory term for the condition of fully adopting a fictional worldview, usually reinforced by Facebook trash and cable TV “news.” Some poor souls suffering from brainworms might believe, say, that a global cabal of Satanist Marxist billionaires is abducting and trafficking children to harvest their adrenochrome. (That’s the background plot of Q-anon, if you weren’t familiar.)
But brainworms predate Facebook and TikTok. Remember our old nemesis, Satan? If you were around in the 1980s, you might recall the “Satanic Panic,” in which mass media drove an unfounded hysteria that teenagers were sacrificing children in demonic rituals. It ruined the lives of thousands of people, but it was good for ratings and magazine sales. Real witch hunts aren’t relegated to the distant past.
You don’t need to fully succumb to brainworms to fall for a con. Did you hear about the Wayfair hoax? In the summer of 2020, someone noticed that a handful of products deep within Wayfair’s website seemed astronomically priced, like $19,299 for a bookshelf. Some of these products bore people’s names, like “Ashley Pine Bookshelf.” And wouldn’t you know it, here’s a missing child in Indiana named Ashley! And if you plug the product number 9056332 into Yandex, a Russian search engine, it comes up with a picture of a child. That must be Ashley! Wayfair is selling children!
This silly fantasy generated tens of thousands of posts and millions of engagements on social media platforms. Many people who fell for it and shared it had never heard of Q-anon. In fact, the Wayfair hoax was but a thematic spinoff of Q-anon, in the way the Fargo TV show takes inspiration from the Fargo movie.
It was the interactivity of the Wayfair hoax — search for this item yourself! now plug that number into this search engine — that inspired its credibility and then its virality. And nobody could credibly disprove that an internet retailer was selling children. Once you engaged with it, and maybe even shared it yourself on Facebook, you were all the way in. And you’d now raised your hand for the next scammer.
The Wayfair hoax helped nobody. It harmed real people. It’s another episode in our user-generated information environment, one that social media platforms can’t possibly solve. And being proved wrong doesn’t fix people; they’ve merely identified themselves as marks for the next hoax.
But we’re all marks.
Learning to see your worms
And yet… skepticism of the broader narrative is good! After all, in recent years US mass media — the supposed truth-seeking journalists — convinced a majority of Americans that Iraq had ties to 9/11 (2003), that a home purchase was riskless (2007), and that Hillary Clinton’s private email server was treasonous (2016).
This isn’t about to get better. CNN recently retooled to improve its ratings — and reporting more precisely with proper context was not in that plan. In its lawsuit against Fox News, Dominion released texts from Tucker Carlson noting Fox’s declining stock price as a reason to lie more consistently.
The modern challenge of society is retaining a healthy sense of skepticism without succumbing to fantasy narratives.
How do we do this? Imagine you saw this tweet about Bill Gates.
Mercedes Schlapp isn’t a rando. She’s a conservative power player who worked in both GW Bush and Trump’s administrations, a board member of the NRA, wife to the chair of the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC.
And here she is, claiming that Bill Gates is buying up the majority of American farmland. She picked this up from other internet claims that Gates owns up to 80% of the USA’s farmland.
Other internet voices from across the political spectrum have run with the “Gates is buying all the land” meme, often with the question “Why?”, which then connects other truths and lies into an evil plot about weaponizing food.
So first, what is real? Well, a media publication called Land Report was the one that actually broke the story about Gates’s holdings. And it turns out, he is indeed America’s largest landholder, with more than 240,000 acres spread across 18 states (plus another 27,000 acres of other lands). This is somewhat less than Schlapp’s “majority of American farmland.” It’s closer to 0.025% of American farmland. (Schlapp’s tweet is still up.)
Gates is a centi-billionaire thanks to his monopolization of PC software in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Total US farmland is worth about $3 trillion. Which means that even if Gates sold everything he had, the best he could do is about 3% of US farmland.
So why has Gates bought those acres? Well, he’s extremely rich. You don’t leave $100B in a money market account. You invest it in lots of different assets. Including land.
That’s the real explanation. It must be.
But what have I done here? I’ve assembled a few numbers from various sources and used them to “prove” my narrative, which is that land is a normal ingredient of a massive investment portfolio. I also trust Gates not to be a Bond villain because he’s been scrutinized for decades, and we know who he is.
But… most of us don’t actually know Bill Gates. We can’t see how much land he actually owns. We can’t be sure how much he’s worth. All of my supporting facts are shared by sources that I’m choosing to trust. Why do I choose to trust them? Is Land Report even legit? How can we know?
The answer is: we can’t!
And this is why it’s incumbent on us to do the hard work. When the local TV news reports, “Police say the suspect…,” that doesn’t mean that person really did that. When a major media outlet reports TikTok influencer falls off a cliff recording a dance video, think about how that story makes you feel, why that media outlet chose to frame that story in that way, and how 10 more of these stories might change how you feel about technology or the narcissism of young people.
It’s not easy. But we all live in a story of our own making, influenced by the other stories that people share. Who is the bad guy in your story? Is it Bill Gates? Is it capitalism? Is it Satan? Is it the billionaire class? Is it the Kochs?
We all have brainworms. Understanding your narrative is the first step to seeing them, and taking control of them, too.
What is your narrative and who wrote it?
In a future edition, I’ll write about how digital fakery — and its mere existence — is polluting our information environments even further.
PS: Thanks for reading to the end. Please leave a comment or email me and tell me why you live where you live.
Why I live where I live: When choosing a grad school in February of 19xx, after I visited the frozen tundra of the Northeast and the Midwest, the smell of roses from the Berkeley Rose Garden instantly convinced me to come here, before I'd even exited the airport transit van. At the time, despite thinking I was good at geography, I didn't know that Silicon Valley was here, and not down in LA; aside from a 2-year sojourn to London, it's kept me (pleasantly) here ever since. We discovered Maui during the pandemic, and now plan to retire there; but in the meantime, the Bay Area is home.