The Noble Game

You should be rewarded for doing good things and punished for doing bad things, duh

Let’s imagine that you’re a journalist. You’ve done all the appropriate journalist things. You went to the best journalism schools. As a young hardcore journalism dork you had posters of Edward R. Murrow on your bedroom walls. You learned all the right journalism principles like truth, justice, fairness and all of that. You even lived your life in accordance with those principles. People say you’re like Clark Kent/Lois Lane without the super powers. You arrived into the job market just itching to bring truth to the world.

So what was the trajectory of your life after school?

You got a job at a newspaper or magazine somewhere. That was way harder than you thought. There weren’t a lot of places to find jobs. Most of your classmates didn’t find any journalism job at all and had to go into a related field. Maybe they were the lucky ones because for the first few years you have to get a second job just to get by. People tease you that you could make more money working for a fast food restaurant.

But you work hard, persevere, climb up the ranks one column at a time, and eventually you… start to make enough to not die. That was the ceiling on your income after you got lucky enough to get a job and get promoted. Not dying. You’ll never be rich. Hell, you’ll never even be comfortable. There are a few superstar journalists, people who are very entrepreneurial and great at marketing, but that’s not you. You’re just a standard search-for-truth journalist and starting your own separate business, marketing, and dealing with weird celebrity level status isn’t in your skill stack.

You’ve never knowingly spread a falsehood and when you’ve done such a thing accidentally you’ve always been the first to set the record straight. Your headlines are straightforward, factual. You don’t play games with the truth or your readers emotions. You don’t let yourself get influenced by external factors when you’re writing the truth for your readers. You go out to see what’s happening and you report on it.

Let’s take a quick tally of where you’re at now:

Your virtue has led you to make virtually no money.

Also, no one reads what you write. Some do but it’s not most people.

What you write also doesn’t really have a whole lot of influence.

It’s kind of humiliating.

You have done everything morally and professionally correct and you live a pretty bleak existence in a pretty bleak world.

Why is this the case? Because a few decades ago for someone to know what was happening in the world they had to go pick up a piece of paper that had words all over it and today they can look down at a little electronic rectangle with words all over it. That’s all it took. Once that paper bottleneck broke it was game over for the news industry as it had previously existed.

Ad revenues disappeared. Nobody wants to pay to advertise on that big piece of paper when everyone is looking at their glowing rectangle. Advertisements have to be viewed to make business sense. Also, nobody needs to buy your big piece of paper when they can find the same information on their glowing rectangle. Budgets dwindled. Editors were laid off. Fact-checking departments shrank. Quality assurance became a quaint and absurd luxury.

When blogs appeared people decried the opinions of random people who were not subject to editorial review were now being given a place of prominence. You never hear anyone bring up this criticism anymore. It’s like bemoaning you don’t have a farrier to shoe your horse or a servant to crank your car engine to start.

You know who and what has prospered? Bullshit and bullshit artists. People who tell you things that you want to hear. People who are great at pissing you off. Outright liars who know how to get under your skin so you will click on their article, look at their ad, and put money into their pocket. Liars for convenience who tell stories to please some particular interest group and know that nobody will check on them and their work.

This is an ignoble game. The worse of a person you are, the more you prosper. Be flashy because attention is all that matters. Don’t be substantive, too slow and too expensive. Appeal to emotion because you have to compete against all the other “content” out there. Doggedly stick to one point of view because you need a loyal readership and the second you disappoint them they’ll be gone.

Yeah, someone somewhere will say you’re full of shit if you behave badly, even prove it out in some long spergy substack or YouTube video, but it’s not like that sticks to you for longer than three days. It doesn’t follow you around. A few people become aware of it but it doesn’t go further than that. No one can remember anything anymore. Meanwhile your pocket book gets fat and the journalist from the first part, who did everything right, has to call up their mom or dad to help them get through the winter.

I don’t mean to romanticize the past and certainly there were enough major journalism blunders to make you blanch but they at least had to do a great job of pretending to be honest even when they were full of shit.

It’s like we live in ancient city states. There is a law on substack. There is a law on Facebook. There is a law on X. But there is no ordering law to the internet as a whole. The internet is where all this happens and it’s also a bit like the Wild West where you can shoot someone at a saloon in one town and then go be the sheriff in the next.

Now, stop crying. You’re an adult. It’s our responsibility to fix this. This is an ignoble game with perverse incentives. You can’t have a society when nobody can agree on what’s true and what’s false. You can’t have a walled garden like substack and just expect that to be enough. Look around you. The political division in the United States is the worst it’s been since the Civil War. You can’t have a profession that relies on people having rich moms and dads to subsidize their income when that profession is as essential as “help people understand what’s going on.” This has to get straightened out.

We have to find a way to go into the centers of power, knock down the doors, and then start knocking teeth out. We have to leave our city, conquer our neighbors, and rebuild the Roman Republic. And we have to do it in such a way that we don’t end up with terrifying “Misinformation Czars” and other scary top-down forms of control.

So let’s lay out what is happening today and we’ll see where it goes crooked. Then we’ll work backwards from that to see what we can do to fix things. From this, we will design the Noble Game. The game where being a good person, doing the right thing, causes you to be rewarded.

1. Today, something happens and someone goes and writes up a quick article about it. They don’t really care if they know a lot about it, they just need to get some eyeballs.

2. They try to be technically honest because they don’t want to be sued — lawsuits are expensive, so the threshold of dishonesty here would have to be pretty high to actually get slapped— but there’s not really going to be huge consequences if they leave out important context. Or if they mislead and imply something other than the plain and honest truth. In fact, it’s better because then people will share the link and be upset about it on the internet!

3. A flashy, clickable headline is written that is mysterious and compelling. Clickbait. Something like “Does Glenn Greenwald have an Onlyfans?” Or “Does Glenn Greenwald Literally Eat Shit?” The answer will be no, but the message will be conveyed in the headline.

4. This link gets posted to social media and hopefully goes viral. One of the best ways to go viral is to piss people off, like by implying that Glenn Greenwald, an accomplished journalist, has an Onlyfans and that he eats feces.

5. People are pissed and outraged that their ally, or else smugly amused that their enemy, is having his or her name drug through the mud. And share the link on their social media accounts to decry the lies or to gloat about the “basic truth” being shared. A seemingly basic assumption, but the headline and all of that appears just the way that the writer intended and makes people go nuts.

6. The link is clicked.

7. This is a pivotal, yet almost invisible assumption, but today your browser just renders whatever the hell the article says with the information exactly as intended by the article writer.

8. You see an ad.

9. Money.

Let’s rework those steps into a better game. A game with carrots and sticks. A Noble Game where you are punished for doing the wrong thing and rewarded for doing the right thing. Let’s do the happy path first. The world as it should be. You get rewarded for doing what’s right.

1. Something happens and you, knowing you’re an expert in that particular topic, go to write up an article on it. You have an awareness of what other professionals are working on and if your article will be mostly redundant. You start off with an ability to prioritize your efforts. You have a track record in your beat and you know you’re the best at a number of particular subjects. You also know what other subjects are out there that need coverage and experts.

2. You carefully write your article, making sure you actually know what the hell you’re talking about and include any sort of important, critical context, because you have a reputation to maintain and it really matters that you do a good job. We’re not going to talk about how that happens just yet but it’s important in this step that you know this is the world you live in. You start writing with something to lose by being wrong.

3. You write a very straightforward, factual headline, and include the conclusion of the article in the headline. Someone just reading the headline could get an accurate big picture view of the story without reading the article.

4. The link gets posted to social media. In the beginning, a review process begins. Random people, inside of what we will call your Trust Network, and also in other Trust Networks, read and rate your article for Accuracy, Importance and for Interest. They vet the article to make sure it makes sense and that it’s not talking about something outside the public interest. In this version of the game, because you played it right, you article gets high scores. Based on these two scores, your article has its visibility promoted. Eventually, once you have a reputation, you coast on your past reputation but can lose it at any time as you will see in later steps.

5. Someone somewhere, who has paid into the service that rates articles, which we will call an Internet News Index, sees your article. There are some very helpful, factual ads there, but we don’t have to understand how they work just yet for this system to make sense. They open this service to get their news feed. It’s all filtered by importance and interest. Clickbait doesn’t exist in it at all. The fact this person saw the headline is recorded. Even if they didn’t open the article, they benefited from your journalism.

6. Let’s say the reader clicks the link. Their view is recorded. They have the opportunity to add commentary to your article if anything is wrong or if any important context is missing, but they don’t. It costs money to make a challenge like this, it’s like there’s a little pot of money they can win by being right but they have to risk just as much if they’re wrong. It’s not an issue here. You did everything right. They just read it and think “good, great job! I’m glad I can trust the news I read.”

7. Again, pivotal and almost invisible assumption here, but when your browser displayed this article it also reached out to check against a table somewhere. This table had the url of the article, the author’s name, and whole slew of other columns to do things like add text and coloring to the webpage. It also keeps a score. This journalist always plays it straight and they have a high score. Nothing is added to their article. Except their name is in green.

8. You maybe see an ad. This is an independent outlet after all.

9. Money is sent to the venue and the author from their own ads.

10. Money is also put aside for the author and the venue by the Internet News Index based on scores and view count. The author gets paid twice, as part of your subscription money to the service.

This seems to hand-wavy, doesn’t it? “Oh, everyone is just going to start suddenly doing a great job? Not even an idea.”

So, let’s talk about what happens if you’re an asshole.

1. Something interesting happens.

2. You, an evil journalist who we will go ahead and call “Lailor Torenz,” decides to just deadass make something up. Let’s say you, “Lailor Torenz” were on a big group chat app called “Flubhouse” and a CEO Tech Billionaire named… oh, I don’t know, “Mark Anderson” gives a speech and you weren’t paying attention but for one second it kinda sorta sounded like he said the word “retarded.” He didn’t. Anyone on this call could verify this. There is a recording of the call you could also check. Anyway, too good to check, you push full steam ahead and write an article accusing him of using the word “retarded.”

3. To save yourself some legal woes, you write an article with the headline “Did Mark Anderson use the R-Slur on Flubhouse?” Because if it’s a question it’s totally fine.

4. The link gets posted to social media. People love people who are r-slurred so they get up in arms about it and start attacking Mark Anderson.

5. And oh boy did you just fuck up, because Mark Anderson pays for the Internet News Index. He has rights as a Digital Citizen of the service. It’s no longer a world where you can lie and just get away with it. If you do this now, your reputation will follow you around the entire internet. Mark Anderson lays out a very straightforward, compelling case, that he did not in fact use the r-slur at all and it’s pretty r-slurred for Lailor Torenz to have even said so. He pays the fee to challenge your article.

6. Mark Anderson’s case is reviewed by random people in his Trust Network and then by others across other Trust Networks. Everyone agrees. I’m going to skip over some scoring pieces here but it’s in everyone’s interests to be honest even if you’re in something like the Liberal Trust Network against the Conservative Trust Network. Losing cases is bad. They’re all in competition to have the notes and headlines that most people see in cases like this. This situation is also pretty obvious. He didn’t do it. The whole article is a fabrication.

7. A journalist with a high trust score is assigned to rewrite the headline and make annotations to the article. This all goes into a table somewhere in a back-end database. Basically it has the article url, the headline, the new headline, and a bunch of text strings and annotations.

8. Now whenever someone using the Internet News Index (INI) sees that link it’s flagged. The text is all Yellow. This is Yellow Journalism. As those web elements loaded into your browser —I admit this is going to be hard to do natively on mobile, easy as cake on desktop— they were enriched with data from the Internet News Index. Lailor Torenz’s name is yellow. She has been found to have lied carelessly. Her social media profiles are all linked in the INI, aggregated there and reviewed by INI contributors. If anyone who uses the service sees her social media her name and everything she writes will be yellow. There will be a link they can click to see why and what she did and what she did to go and make it right. The headlines of her articles are replaced with text written by other people. “This article contains a false story that Mark Anderson said the word Retarded. This has been verified to have not occurred.” The original headline is still there, recorded, and you can see it but now on top of that article you can see a blow by blow of exactly where the error occurred. You don’t have to look for it. It’s right there.

9. Lailor Torenz has now taken a hit to her credibility score. She can try to minimize the hit by owning up to the mistake but it’s still there. Her articles won’t promote as high in the future and it will take time to earn that reputation back. For some period of time her work will be reviewed. You also get paid better if you have high trust so that’s gone down as well.

10. Let’s say she fights this and keeps bullshitting. She refuses to even participate. Someone else can be assigned to make her defense. Everyone will have their own rules but I’m guessing the rule across all Networks will be three strikes, and you’re out. Three Strikes and your name is red. People have to deliberately search for you and adjust their settings but by default anything you produce just… doesn’t render in someone’s browser. You just get shut off based on rules that everyone will agree and vote on. You’re flagged as a liar.

All of these rules, working together, incentivize people to create factual, documented arguments that can be understood by broad groups of people. That’s the rewarded behavior that we are missing. Not saying something one group of people will like. Or just straight up bullshitting. Reward being honest in a way that is understandable by random people from different backgrounds. That’s the key function that allows a nation to cohere. That and a show of confidence that people understand like Trust scores and a “You would earn $X,XXX.XX” if you can prove this to be incorrect.”

I don’t want to destroy party or faction altogether. Those are basic human instincts that will never go away so long as we’re human. I just want them to be constrained by reality and set them in competition for the attention of normal people. There’s real value in being able to rely on people you trust to help you navigate the news cycle. Imagine how much harder it will be to say you really understand what happened to JFK if your friends can say “Well, there’s a six hundred thousand dollar bounty on that if you can prove it out.”

If this sounds Orwellian, I’d like you to consider a few arguments. The natural balance to Freedom of Speech is Freedom of Association. If someone says something you don’t like and they just keep doing it constantly, you wouldn’t just choose to be around them all the time. That’s kind of how the internet works today. You can’t push away bad actors except at your local, individual level. It also used to be the case when you heard something that you’d rely on your peers to help you make sense of them and understand what’s going on. Those structures don’t replicate on the internet. It’s like humanity grew an external neural system and then got epilepsy. Your brain filters signals and noises. We have to do the same thing online.

Pretty soon, AI will take the choice of doing this away. There will be so much text written, you won’t be able to tell if it came from a human or not or if they’re true or not. Whole websites with huge archives will be created every few seconds. So many images generated that you won’t know which ones reflect reality and which ones don’t. Except if there’s a long, established Trust history from your Network that you can rely on where people have something to lose if they lie to you.

I know I picked up a good fifty people over the last few weeks and only gently alluded to what this substack is about in the last post. So, this is what it is about. Pushing to build this kind of a system for the internet and eventually pushing to build the same kind of structure for politics.