You Should Care About How Your Utopia Actually Works

Thoughts on Turning 40 and an Update on the Trust Assembly

Prompt: A photo of myself and my sons dutifully Ghibilified

Today, I am forty years old.

Let me tell you about a more ancient time in my life. Eons ago, I was an avid watcher of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. For those too young to remember, the “Most Trusted Name in Fake News” was once better described as a force of cultural authority. When The Daily Show told you something was true, myself and most other young people, assumed that no other context was needed. It was unifying! It was electric! Nobody had ever tackled reporting in that way before and it was invigorating to watch. Night after night, the cast made the professional news networks either look like bumbling fools or doddering senile geriatrics. All it took was a combination of laughter, earnestness, and some really good editing. In a 2009 poll conducted by Time Magazine, Jon Stewart was found to be the most trusted newscaster in America.

When I was twenty-one, I would have followed Jon Stewart into hell.

It doesn’t hold up.¹

There’s a saying about weapons proliferation in military circles: “If you build it, they will have it.” It’s hard not to draw a straight line from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart to the countless other independent news streamers who adopted the format. Show a clip, make a joke, laugh in bewilderment, and trash your opponent. Tell the simple story about the simple thing being or not being done! Denounce anyone as an idiot who can’t immediately agree! Leave your opponent without any sense of dignity or good faith! Write off everything that makes the story less than cookie-cutter perfect an act of equivocation.² An ounce of actual reporting now spawns a metric ton of “reaction videos.” When I try to watch one of those old Daily Show clips now, it is tainted by everything that came after.

How was any of this supposed to work?

How was mere reaction supposed to replace trustworthy fact-finding institutions?

I remember people being worried about this, but did anyone ever try to fix it?

We live in the world of easy. The world of instant smug self-righteous satisfaction. The world where if anyone asks that you humble yourself, that you confess ignorance, that there might be a point at the bottom of your enemy’s anger, or that there might be some virtue in your opponent, well they can rot in hell! Empathy? Grace? Mercy? Out of the question!

I began here, to speak to one particular episode of the Daily Show on which Matt Taibbi appeared as a guest. In a clip that I can no longer seem to find on the internet, the two began to joke about the Tea Party. For the young, this was a quasi-libertarian movement within the Republican Party that seems to have been the spiritual precursor to Trumpism. Specifically, the two joked about the typical Tea Party meeting agenda. Hyper-specifically, they laughed about the juxtaposition of items on that agenda like “Lunch” and “Establish a New Media Paradigm for the United States.”

I remember thinking at the time, that someone should definitely do that last one. The model of reporting supported by commercials for cereal or classified ads was already dying. As insufferable as it sounds, even at the time I was very aware of the problem. The entire logging industry in my hometown was crippled because the news couldn’t find a way to make forestry management sound exciting.

For decades that thought has eaten away at me and the news ecosystem has only grown worse. None of this is funny now. None of this makes me want to laugh about the absurdity of it all. This feels more like seeing an old high school friend with a reputation for getting drunk and passing out at parties later in life when he’s begging for loose change on the side of the street. I don’t want to watch people buckle under mob pressure because they know the forces that stand up for fairness and due process have grown weak. I don’t want to live in a world that devolves into shame-games like we are acting out the Scarlett Letter. I certainly don’t want to watch a clip show of a politician making contradictory statements that leads nowhere and does nothing. For everything, there is a season. I could laugh about this in my early twenties. Now I’m forty years old and I have kids.

So, I have been working with a few volunteers to fix this for the last few months. Really. Me and a few other people meet for an hour on Wednesdays to “Establish a New Media Paradigm for the United States.” Otherwise, we communicate by Discord chat. It’s all the time I have between work, family,³ and pumping out content here to increase my profile and visibility. While I may spend a lot of time with my head up in the clouds, I do my best to keep track of the constellations.

This has primarily become a substack about my life and I’m fine with that. That has its uses as well, but I wanted to take a moment to remind everyone about my mission here. I’m sure this feels like I’m speaking out of both sides of my mouth, or being wish-washy, but I don’t particularly get emotionally invested in party politics. I just don’t. I’m not a political animal in any modern sense of the word.⁴ The only instinct I ever have in that regard is disgust at how readily people twist facts to their own ends, or how due process becomes subverted with unprinicpled apologetics down party lines. My mission is to set an honest cornerstone upon which everything else can be built. I’m not looking to put my thumb on the scale for anything except basic civilizational honor. Things like “I conveyed the facts to the best of my ability and didn’t knowingly leave out any context that would make those facts misleading” or “I corrected the record as soon as I had additional information.” Or even, “I was punished by rules everyone agreed to when I continually, willfully, and repeatedly lied to people.”

What myself and the volunteers are building is a two part system, similar to but significantly different from Community Notes.

The first part is a simple browser extension. It takes pieces of clarifying context and corrections, then inserts them into your browser. All you have to do is download the extension, browse the internet, and elements of any webpage you’re viewing are dynamically replaced for greater honesty. None of this is hidden from you. All of it is color-coded and hyperlinked so you can find out what was changed and why. This won’t feel like censorship, rather like you acquired a pair of magical glasses that allowed you to see through mind control. It should also feel like you received a physical copy of a regular newspaper, but that the thousand smartest people you know went through it first and made line edits.

The second part, which we are starting to build now, is where the mess of human rancor will be refined into the crystal of human reason. You’ll be able to form Trust Networks with people who believe and think like you. You’ll be able to cooperate as a group to go out and add corrections to media. You’ll share knowledge with one another, make alliances with other groups, and fight for what you believe. In that fight, order will emerge. As your narratives conflict with the narratives of other groups, you’ll each be forced to justify your beliefs to uninvolved third parties. Those third parties, not you, will judge the outcome. Something like a trial with concrete rules, representatives, and independent jurors will play out. You’ll both have to satisfy the viewpoints of your Trust Network and objective, defensible facts. That means you’ll be incentivized to be upfront with anything that makes your story less than a perfect example of moral outrage. Embarrassment and victory are both public in this system and nobody gets an easy out. Eventually, money will change hands in this process, but from the get-go reputations can be algorithmically won or lost in this exchange. That reputation will determine the ease with which you can amplify your message across the system, and like real life is hard to win and easy to lose.

What we are looking to build is a fair game and a square deal. A place of honor and high ideals. A place worthy of your mature adult belief. A place where you don’t have to close your eyes and then say “and some person, doing… uh, something they can’t explain to me and that I can’t understand… will do some simple magical thing that will make good stuff happen.” What we are building is, yes, a media paradigm where for some massive story to go in front of your eyeballs uncorrected means that the reporter researched every part of it in such painstaking detail that literally nobody else in the system dared to say they were wrong or had anything else of value to add. We aim to do nothing less than to wrap chains of suspicions and chains of trust around the entirety of the internet, and steer it toward civilization.

What we have right now is a small part of the overall system, but an important part. It’s an LLM based web-scraper and headline replacer. Something that can one-shot clickbait headlines by replacing every headline with a short, factual summary. Over time, this will be the system we use to bring scale to the Network. It will take context from your own Trust Group to act as a sort of Guardian Angel for your media gatekeeping. You won’t have to assemble an entire army to painstakingly scour the whole internet to correct a lie. Our tool will keep track of your Trust Network’s viewpoint and perform that action for you. Next, we are building a website, a tool that probably few users of the system will ever see but where the news producers will cooperate and battle with one another to produce the high value context.

This will begin as a browser extension, but over time what we hope to do is expose the contents of this system so that independent social media companies and browsers use what we create as a simple matter of course. We want to create financial incentives so that anyone would be stupid not to incorporate our service. Newspapers could offer membership into our system along with their subscription service as a basic matter of enrollment. A Trust Assembly, as we call it, is the natural evolution of the newspaper. It’s a coherent set of facts about the world we live in, that have been tested to the best of human ability, that follows you as you scroll the internet. It’s not enough for a “fact check” to be written by some nebulous organization outside of your view in order to create some static artifact that doesn’t attach to the media it seeks to correct. It has to be there, in your face, surviving rebuttal after rebuttal. To be worthy of your trust, it has to be able to withstand scrutiny and fair challenge. The more people have this system, the more people know that other people have it, the more powerful and undeniable it becomes.

What I believed when I was a young man watching the Daily Show wasn’t foolish. It’s not foolish to belive in things, or people, or organizations, however easy it is to sink into nihilism and pretend nothing means anything. My eyeroll grows every greater in circumference as young people explain to me that it is all great power games and all of society is made up of sociopaths. Or, that it is all only a game of attention. It is only foolish to believe that you should be passive in the maintenance of your society, that even as you mature you are not required to take up the duty of your predecessors, or that comedians should summon more responsibility to maintain honest journalism than you.

We millennials can no longer call ourselves children or point to older generations and say, “they did it! Not me!” We are the gray-beards in the room now. We were the first generation to cross from the analogue world into the digital world. We can remember the best of both worlds. We should take what know and restore what was lost.

This is all currently happening on a volunteer basis and we don’t have funding aside from the money I set aside from this substack to pay for basic stuff like a GitHub license or a web domain. My goal now is to seek funding once we have more of the product ready for demonstration. If you would like to volunteer and have web developer experience, or have worked with decision engines of any kind, please drop a comment or send me a message.

Bit by bit, no matter how many times my children get sick and throw me off schedule, we are going to make this happen.

1. To be clear, I still have a fond regard for Jon Stewart. I do think he displayed genuine bravery on multiple occasions. It’s just that I now believe what he was desperately trying to tell the world when his popularity was at its height. He’s a comedian. Apart from some laudable work with veterans and first responders, he just wants to make people laugh.

2. I don’t think the Daily Show was as guilty of this as its descendents, but it defintely started the movement. Also, in fairness, a lot of this was inevitable with the internet.

3. My wife interrupted me in the writing of this piece to tell me to go check the children’s play set in the backyard for hornets, as an example.

4. Cards on the table, I want to live in Clark Kentistan. I want us all to just be very honest with each other, work hard, report successes and failures, and not get too caught up in things to forget to care about our neighbors. We should have really frank conversations on if something is actually working versus “should be” or “would in a perfect world.” I really don’t think either party is aligned to that, nor do I ever expect them to be.