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Most "low information" consumers know production is inauthentic. They are not bothered by this while they enjoy the 31st season of The Bachelor. Another segment of somewhat higher information consumers knows and considers the production (inauthenticity) doesn't end with the 31st season of The Bachelor. Production reaches into their TikTok feeds and their least favorite political party's national convention. It merges with and invades their hobbies, interests, and relationships. It reaches out and touches them when as their crush posts a new cute Instagram story dancing to some music.
"What is real?" used to be understood as an appropriate question for smoke filled dorm rooms and entertainment. It has never
~beenfelt more appropriate to ask this question than while facing a screen. We happen to do that a lot. The philosophy major with bloodshot eyes might not be able to understand, but for this segment of consumers this an uncomfortable question with uncertain answers. Production -- theatrics, marketing, controversy -- has taken over the commons. This may not be unprecedented experience, but it is probably unprecedented at scale and presence.Discernment takes a lot of energy and time. Ain't nobody got time for that. An inaccurate, but simple categorization system is more useful than uncertain consideration. The hack the nerds don't want you to know is to develop and tune heuristics. Fine, when and by how much? Who do I trust to tune if not the cool dudes who see what I can see and are like me? What is a heuristic anyway? If we feel mean we might dub this a Midwit Consumer Demographic. We don't feel mean though, so we say the path of least resistance is the most natural thing in the world. Better to be guarded by overzealous "fake" categorization than to feel duped like some jabroni. Even the most normie consumers share this perspective at times, perhaps as they read the latest Instagram story debunking junk that bamboozled unwitting others.
I don't know if the epistemic rot is worse on an individual level than a hundred years ago, but if a person wanted to host an everything is fake brainworm they've never been more able to find vindication. The algorithm, its production and theatrics, is always on The Feed. We should probably be more concerned if this segment of people didn't increase after growing distrust of institutions and the evolution of brainhacks-- institutions that do frequently earn a degraded reputation. They fuck up, spectacularly so, and it's prudent to be suspicious of actors that profit off of a fuck-up.
I'm sufficiently conditioned to tolerate a fake mistake technique or the ol' "accidental" release of a trailer. Leveraging an unplanned mistake is the role of PR, so you can't blame them for that. The same types of people, if not the very same ones, do often enough somehow, someway, end up in yet another racist race swap controversy discourse for the latest Disney publicity campaign. While there is a "look in the mirror" defense of these kinds of tactics I don't find them convincing. It's not conspiracy, it's incentives all the way down-- "accident" or not. I'll still cover my bases: the schizos are always right.
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