When we lose all trust…
This a.m., I’m sitting in my dimly-lit office in a chair that is regular-adult-sized (i.e., too big for me). My walls are adorned with art, photos, and books (on floating shelves) that were made by humans. Probably.
I’m drinking coffee that I trust was made by professionals and cleared for sale by some governing body who has to keep me at least reasonably free of…death, and other things short of it.
I am listening to Melanie Martinez, and my ears trust the sounds they hear are a product of a real voice and a real person somewhere (despite MM’s alien-based backstory).
I am writing this with my two hands, a computer, and no other resources (I can almost guarantee there will be typos, the telltale sign of human touch) (right?).
Today, my son will enjoy a field trip to the local courthouse to engage in a mock trial. It’s got me thinking. How many years have we spent refining our rules of evidence? How many iterations of the hearsay rule and exceptions have we created as a society? But that could all dissolve faster than Donovan drinking from the wrong cup in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
When I was a district attorney, I’d sit in a slightly dimmer-lit office with less art on the walls. I’d get a stack of light green file folders containing police reports, and I’d read through them in search of facts: facts that I believed would convince a jury of guilt for some crime or another. The most solid facts were admissions, photos, and videos. That could all change in the next few years.
The last few years have been a whirlwind for society when it comes to trusting what we see and hear. The last decade has been a whirlwind for me personally when it comes to trusting what I feel and believe. I saw so many times when human memory failed us (my own included) and where emotions and motives undermined the trustworthy nature of evidence (sometimes even changing a person’s own actual belief…no lies, just misremembered ‘facts’). Now we’re seeing a widespread ability to create convincing audio clips, photos, and even videos of fake facts. If you can find one person saying one thing, you can surely find another person (or even the exact same person, computer-generated!) saying the exact opposite. Experts of every field disagree on important issues. At least, they do if you believe the online commentary.
But is the online commentary real?
Combined with our near-immediate access to vast amounts of subpar information, we’re now collectively learning the hard way that access to more information is not access to more understanding, that greater opportunity to create has not instilled in us a greater appreciation for creativity, that a global ability to gossip and discuss has not resulted in better collaboration or unification.
Instead, we’ve informationed ourselves into a global diagnosis of paralysis by analysis. We no longer believe anything unless we find some kernel (or cult leader) that we follow with reckless obedience because we’re desperate for the ability to trust again. God, we just want to be able to turn our hyper-analyzing off sometimes, please.
And so I ask again, is the online commentary real? When was the last time you asked someone in person and not in a group how they feel about an important issue?
I submit that this is the only way of the future. We simply must make a return to actual human interactions if we want to have any stable form of unified trust. The lizard-brain demands eye contact. No amount of advances in technology will change the millennia of biological building blocks that make us human. We need to peer into the soul of other living, breathing beings. We need to feel soil in our hands. We need to embrace and feel one another’s warmth. Our ears need the symphony that is group laughter, shared humor.
Our inventions have learned how to compute better than our own minds can, but one thing they cannot do as well as we can (yet) is exist in reality.
The dexterity of the human hand, for instance, is still unparalleled in technology. And when we speak what we truly mean in person — meaning without the filter of a money-hungry algorithm that is forced, by fiduciary law (that we ourselves created. pfft), to satisfy shareholders by exploiting outrage — then, and only then, can we really understand one another.
I wish often, mostly to no avail, that we could collectively decide to put the screens aside and go outside more. I wish we had to rely on each other more. I’d gladly give you a cup of sugar if you asked. But then, you can just use your phone to order that sugar to your house and it will be here in an hour or two, so why? I wish we would talk to each other and remember how to respond without emojis. I read somewhere that the human face has 43 muscles and can make more than 10,000 expressions. The ancient beasts in all of us are likely attuned to read those expressions. What is getting lost in translation when we digitize, apply bandwidth lags, and then de-digitize? What is lost when we keyboard-warrior our way into each other’s feeds?
In the end, I think trust will live or die by this one decision: will we come back together (literally) or will we keep destroying the very idea of trust and Ready-Player-One ourselves into a race to the bottom (of humanity)?
Meet me at midnight. Literally anywhere.
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