The entire Internet is a cargo cult

"They don't need to be right or even the smartest, they only need to be smart enough to fool you"

The “cargo cult” came about during WWII when Japanese and American militaries set up bases and airstrips on Pacific islands. The indigenous peoples of these islands, such as Vanuatu, had no idea what was going on, but to them, it seemed like magic. Once the advanced militaries, left, the locals repeated the actions of the soldiers without knowing what they meant, in an attempt to summon them back. They went so far as to build fake airplanes and control towers.

In modern parlance, internet denizens might say that they were “LARPing” or “cosplaying” as industrial militaries. The former term means “live action role playing” and the latter means “dressing up as your favorite super hero in pretend.” The fact that these two terms, which come from anime and comic culture, tells you a lot about the people who coined the terms.

When I say “the internet is a cargo cult” I mean that everything is fake. Not in the “conspiracy theory” meaning, like “the moon landing was faked” kinda way. What I mean is that it’s more like Plato’s Cave.

The internet is a low dimensional projection of a higher dimensional space, i.e. reality.

You’ve heard some of the terms that people use to describe this: virtue signaling, posturing, feed curation, and so on. Everyone’s heard the stories of an influencer who goes to the beach for a few minutes to take some vanity pictures, to create a facsimile of a luxurious vacation, and simply leaving. Others rent Lamborghinis or just pay for a photoshoot, or do the same on private jets.

Everything you see on the internet is a shadow puppet

But I am not talking about influencer culture. I’m talking about everything else. Substack, LinkedIn, YouTube. Almost everything is just cosplay. It’s like that line from Dune where Paul is worried that his dreams will come true and Duncan says “the most important things happen when you’re awake, because that’s where you make things happen.”

The internet is the dreaming.

That’s not to say that there aren’t people of substance on the internet—people that are really doing, really building, really living the high life, and really moving mountains. But it is much easier to pretend to do these things than to actually do them.

Interestingly, humanity evolved to deal with this.

In an era before electronic communication, when humans lived in clans and tribes, there were a few mechanisms that individuals could use to cement in their status:

Costly Signaling—Costly signaling is the opposite of virtue signaling. Costly signaling requires doing stuff that is expensive, such as time, body, energy, or possessions. A modern example would be going to church every Sunday, where people can witness evidence that you are committed to the community and the faith. Another example would be showing up to all company functions, even when they aren’t paid. It’s a way of advertising commitment to a group.

Ongoing Provisioning—A parallel idea is “provisioning” which is the ongoing furnishing of evidence of your skill, ability, merit, or value. In traditional cultures, this would be in examples like successful hunts or raiding parties, where your peers can see and measure your prowess. Today, this is done with substantial milestones and achievements, such as getting awards, accolades, conspicuous wealth, and so on. In my case, I got a YouTube silver play button (an award for getting to 100,000 subscribers). That is “social proof”

In a traditional setting, deception is a huge problem. Like the cargo cult phenomenon of today, people could pretend to have contributed to the tribe. After all, there were no paper trails, no cell phone pictures or videos, so you could claim anything. And if someone wasn’t there to witness it, or if it was open to interpretation, a lot of your social status became hearsay. You could claim “no, I saved the chief’s son’s life during the raid!” and unless someone directly contradicted you, that might stand. But of course, the rumor mill will churn and people will grumble “but no one saw it.”

Gossip it supposed to be sinful, but it’s a perfectly natural mechanism for social coordination, and we see it writ large on the internet. Everyone on the internet with any traction will have fans and detractors, and the digital equivalent of gossip and rumors will coordinate someone’s status, the “broad consensus” of “is this person trustworthy or are they full of it?”

Here’s my “costly signaling” achievement. Whatever else is true, I’ve convinced more than 100,000 people to subscribe to my YouTube channel. This picture serves as a form of “provisioning” of effort and achievement. This is why all awards, medals, and accolades exist.

Everything you see on the internet is stamp collecting. Feather collecting. The affordances of this system are different, though. How do you furnish substance where everything is dubious? You must look for institutional backing, general consensus, and engage in the gossip mill.

In some respects, this is a great invention for humanity. Rather than governments, media, and universities being the primary gatekeepers of facts, truth, and science—now everyone is an epistemic gatekeeper.

The first problem is that most people absolutely suck at epistemics.

You don’t have to be correct, accurate, or even truthful, all you have to do is convince enough people on the internet that you’ve got some substance. And then their perception becomes their reality.

This is why people complaining about AI “spewing out plausible sounding bullshit” is a big problem. What do you think most people on the internet are doing? It’s all just plausible sounding BS.

You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend.

The same principle applies to intelligence, deception, and substance on the internet. The lowest common denominator are people with low information literacy, low scientific literacy, and just low literacy in the first place. You’ll notice that the most famous and popular content is aiming for a rather… pedestrian audience.

The second problem is that stupid people don’t realize just how stupid they are.

“I don’t understand you, therefore you are wrong.” This is perhaps the most tragic cognitive bias humans have. If enough people don’t understand you, it’s either because you’re actually a moron, or because you are so far beyond most people that they’ll never catch up.

This leads to the idiom “Being right too earlier is socially equal to being wrong.”

For the internet (or broadly, the noosphere/exocortex) to come to consensus, all the talking heads, bloggers, and commentators need to do their research, post their video essays, appear on podcasts, and eventually the novelty signal fades, and we’ve achieved consensus.

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Nothing I’ve mentioned here is truly an original thought. This phenomenon has been studied eight ways from Sunday, even since before the internet was created. And I didn’t even touch on bots, astroturfing, and narrative distortion from money. I simply spoke about individual incentives and epistemics.

The reason I’m writing this, though, is because I’m slowly stepping back from the internet to focus on more substance. Offline work. That includes consulting, research, and engaging with real businesses and real policymakers. I originally created my platform to be an outlet for my work. I realized that I didn’t need to go through institutional gatekeepers, that I could go directly to students, professors, business leaders, and politicians.

That’s not to say I’ve become a bitter old curmudgeon who hates the thing that made me famous, I’m simply coming to terms with how this system works. And, like me, pretty much anyone can use the internet to create a series of sock puppets and shadow puppets and the facsimile of legitimacy—and they do. Anyone who wants to influence conversations: be wary. They don’t have to be correct, or even the smartest. They merely need to be smart enough to fool you.