The Breakdown - The End of Consensus Reality with Jon Askonas

Episode Date: May 6, 2023

One of the jarring but regular experiences of modern life is discovering that someone, perhaps even someone close to you, sees the world and the events that happened in it in a wildly different way from what your perception tells you happened. It can feel like we're all living in completely different realities.   More and more, argues Catholic University Professor Jon Askonas, we are living in different realities. Jon is currently in the midst of a set of long-form explorations about the end of consensus reality for the New Atlantis journal. They explore how the internet came to fracture the perception of a common shared reality that was, it turns out, an artifact of a high centralized media apparatus during the 20th century.   What lies on the other side of the end of consensus reality is the question. Is it a bad thing, or simply different? Will it necessarily engender new institutions? These are the questions Jon and NLW explore on today's episode. Enjoying this content? SUBSCRIBE to the Podcast: https://pod.link/1438693620 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/nathanielwhittemorecrypto Subscribeto the newsletter: https://breakdown.beehiiv.com/ Join the discussion: https://discord.gg/VrKRrfKCz8 Follow on Twitter: NLW: https://twitter.com/nlw Breakdown: https://twitter.com/BreakdownNLW “The Breakdown” is written, produced and hosted by Nathaniel Whittemore aka NLW. Research is by Scott Hill. Editing is by Rob Mitchell and Kyle Barbour-Hoffman. Our theme music is “Countdown” by Neon Beach.

Not only do we no longer trust our fellow man to follow those procedures, we also have media ecosystems that can amplify true and fake reporting on violations of those procedures. So there's a huge amplification on violations of procedure and therefore a huge loss of trust in procedure. And so the allure of crypto is you can agree on the procedures ahead of time. You can abet them in a cybernetic system, which is not only difficult to modify, but is also highly auditable and automatically auditable. and perhaps this can be a path back to certain kinds of trust between these reality communities.

Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. What's going on, guys? It is Saturday, May 6th, and today we are talking with John Asconus. John is an assistant professor of politics at Catholic University of America, a writer for the publication the New Atlantis, and generally a really, really interesting thinker. He's currently in the midst of a series of essays called reality, a post-mortem. It's an exploration of, as he put it, what killed consensus reality, and it includes essays like what happened to consensus reality, reality is just a game now, how Stuart made Tucker, and what was the fact. When we talk about

big-picture power shifts, one of the things that underlies a huge amount of political and social, and economic discourse, is a changing understanding and engagement with what reality actually is. The internet has fragged communities into archipelagos of belief, each of whom have different understandings of reality that can ultimately clash with one another in uncomfortable ways. This, John argues, is a larger trend, not something that's just based on recent social media, and because of that, probably needs to be grappled with as a new force in the world. The conversation that I have here is, I believe, a part one of at least two or three, hopefully, because there's just so much to get into.

Now, a couple quick notes. First, this was recorded during the last week of April right after Tucker Carlson had released his video indicting the media after having left Fox. So that's the context in terms of any date references we make. Second, I was recording this not in my normal studio, and unfortunately, I accidentally recorded it on my iPods instead of on my normal microphone.

So my audio is just absolutely garbage. I apologize endlessly for that, but the conversation was too good to not release it. Luckily, John is using a good mic, and so the important part of the conversation you'll hear with crystal clarity. So with those caveats aside, let's dive into this conversation

with John Asconis about the end of consensus reality. All right, John, welcome to the breakdown. How you doing, sir? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm so excited for this conversation. I have a feeling that this will be a part one, hopefully conversation, just based on how much there is to talk through. But I heard you on Hidden Forces, this so often happens a couple weeks ago. I started reading your writing. And I've been really, really loving the sort of the areas that you're exploring the way that you're thinking about this. And so today what I want to do is just sort of give people this introduction and, you know, a very blisteringly fast-paced, probably overview of these ideas that you've been exploring around the end of consensus reality. I think my regular listeners will have heard me probably, you know, have pilfered that phrase a few times. And so today we're going to talk about what that actually means.

And I guess, you know, let's do a quick, you know, introduction to you by way of kind of how you came to be interested in this particular topic. Yeah, sure. I'm happy to, and I think explaining my interest in this topic kind of will segue naturally into talking about the end of consensus reality. So my background is I'm an international relations scholar. I work heavily on technology and politics and technology and military technology and war. And that's sort of a very normal topic. Anybody who studies war appreciates that technological development and change is a huge part of what makes some states, you know, the rise and fall of nations, of outcomes of wars,

et cetera. But the more I came to understand technological change, the more that I felt that we were sort of missing the forest for the trees. That if you looked at, so for instance, there's a lot of interest in international relations at the sort of rise of the Westphalian system, the 30-years war, et cetera. A similarly dynamic moment might be the Napoleonic wars. both of those wars exhibited huge military technological changes. And yet, if you'd gone back 50 years before and 50 years after and asked what led to

this, you know, what were the most compelling changes in society or the most important changes for understanding this change in paradigm in international order, you'd have to conclude that it wasn't military technology or wasn't military technology alone, that actually the changes in media technology, the changes in the way human human, communicate and then therefore the kinds of ideas that circulate and the kind of symbolic concepts that people had the most loyalty to, but that had changed everything. And that to some extent, the wars were a product of those deeper changes as much as anything else.

And this isn't a new idea. I mean, Neil Postman and others have written about the impact of the printing press have made, you know, basically state the claim that the 30-year-s war and the sort of religious war in Europe was a downstream effect of the printing press. So that's been a really large interest for me over the past several years. And whereas my academic work, my focus is a military technology, I've aimed by thinking in this about these bigger questions at a more popular audience, especially in the new Atlantis, but it's some other venues as well.

So, I mean, the key foundation of this series, it's going to be an eight-part series where we're just over halfway through, exactly halfway through with this. latest edition. But the key, the assumption of the series is that we are now living through a change in media, ecology, and society, politics, culture, economy as large as that wrought by the printing press. Amazing. It's just interesting to listen to you to describe this. So I, I studied history in school with a lot of sort of international relations around it. And one of the most influential books, I will never forget reading, uh, I will never forget reading, uh, I said,

the sort of, you know, multi-part Eric Hobbswom series that he did at the end of his life, you know, regardless of the specifics of sort of how much you agree with his analysis or not, the way that he architected, particularly the last book, the age of extremes, where you read, so he basically has a section that's the political explanation of a period, and then he goes back and he does the military explanation of a period, and then he goes back and he does the economic explanation of a period. And you get to the end of each of these sections and you think to yourself, well, that's the most perfect encapsulation of a period. of those 20 years or whatever it was. And then he hits you with this other lens through, you know, military technology or military change and then economic change. And it was fundamentally sort of mind-breaking in terms of seeing the world through multidisciplinary lens, which sort of I think is relevant for this conversation. So where I want to start is I think that there's a fundamental mindset tweak that's sort of required or that is at the core or starting point of all this sort of work that you've been doing.

And that's a mindset shift away from the idea that the consensus reality that we experienced in, call it the long 20th century, was somehow the natural state of affairs versus itself being a particular historical artifact that wasn't necessarily worse or better, but just was, right? And I think that that's relevant because it's very tempting to view this conversation about the breakdown of consensus reality or the end of consensus reality in inherently negative terms because we're talking about the breakdown or the end. And I don't think that that's what you're trying to do. I think that you're just trying to point out that it is fundamentally different. So maybe what we should start with is what that period was, what this sort of unique historical moment of consensus reality was, how it came to be.

and how it shaped society. Yeah, absolutely. And this is a kind of continual theme through the series, although I think that the second essay, Big Essay of the series, how Stuart made Tucker about the media landscape is probably the place where I try to explain this most directly. I mean, the essay is Chuck Klosterman describes this period

as a time in which everyone saw everything and never saw it again, right? It's a combination of, so it's the apex of broadcast media. where for one to many media, where literally one source, whether it's a newspaper or a television channel or cable satellite news, is broadcasting from, you know, one signal out to a large, in fact, infinite audience, right? By the very end of this period, you have the first events that are viewed by, you know, billions with a B number of people that simply was not, that degree of global connectivity did not exist before basically the 1990s. But it's also a period where memory and analysis are expensive, right? And so this imbalance results in a super saturated media world. And if you watch, I mean, I think some of the movies, like movies that came out in 1999

were suffused with this theme. American Beauty, Fight Club, The Matrix, right? They're not about, it's funny because they seem very about. applicable now, especially Fight Club and The Matrix, for reasons maybe we can discuss, but they're not about the internet. The internet is this, in the movie The Matrix, the internet is the cool place where you go to escape from the Matrix. Right?

The Matrix itself is this dense world of constant, of constant shared experience that's completely fake, right? And this is the criticism that people at the time make of it is that you have this, you know, really dense media environment, you have the same, a small number of channels with massive broadcast capability chasing the same stories, constructing this single narratives, and then outside of that, that sort of the mass media is just avoid, right? There are questions you can't talk about, or not you can't, just nobody does, right? So, and this mass media era is dominated by the advertising business model.

This is what we figure out in the early 20th century, is that the most, the most, you know, productive thing you can do with media is produce great media to a huge audience and sell eyeballs to advertisers, right? So everybody, basically everybody congeals on this, or converges, I should say, on this model. And everything about this media space is conditioned by this model, right? In terms of what the incentives of all of the actors involved in it are. So that's the world, and this world went away so quickly, we're still sort of in the backlash are in the, we're still dealing with the reverberations of the end of this business model.

It's been 20 years, basically. I was at a conference a few months ago and somebody was talking about the perils of advertising and advertising media capture. It's like, what planet are you living on? So I think, I recommend, you can look at my work, not only my work, but also, I think Chuck Klosterman's book, the 90s, is one of the best places to go and to try to kind of get back in the vibe, even if you live through it, to remember what it felt like. What I think is interesting about those two sort of movie examples is that they're a good reminder.

I think that right now there is a lot of, let's call it nostalgia or golden age fallacy even around the era of consensus reality because at least it felt like we could agree on something. But I think what's interesting about those is that it's pretty clear that there was a heaving underneath the surface of people who wanted to escape from consensus. reality. I mean, that's literally what both of those two movies are about. And I think that there's a lot more. It's interesting. So in one of your essays, you actually point to the precedes of this non-consensus reality era, not just in the internet, although that is sort of where you locate, I think, a lot of the Genesis, but even going back to basically alternative cultures like D&D in the 80s. And it was basically it's like the Eddie Munson effect, basically. But, you know, so I guess, you know, one, how much were the seeds laid for the internet and the internet being an accelerant versus it really was just this

totally different paradigm that was always inevitably going to reshape things. Well, no, I think the internet is what makes this possible because, you know, there is this paradoxical way, you know, there's a notion of, I forget the name, there's a good article in Tablin magazine about this, but the idea of sort of the controlled opposition, which is, which you see in the Matrix. It's actually like, spoiler alert, if you haven't seen the Matrix movies, you know, You know, the kind of, you know, the Neo escapes from the Matrix to Zion, but it turns out that Zion is part of the system of the Matrix, right? That the space of freedom and opposition and an alternative way of living is actually itself a kind of release valve for the Matrix itself.

And I think that's a kind of, you know, maybe cynical, but nonetheless real way of describing alt's culture in, you know, prior to the, that, that's. the consensus reality. Yes, like alternative culture is only possible because there is a mainstream culture that you can rebel against. So you can only have a counterculture when you have a culture. And the culture was terrible. And so the counterculture was interesting. But it's, I don't think it's a coincidence, right, the counterculture as a category has completely disappeared at the same time that consensus reality has. So, you know, there were these spaces where you had difference. You know, there's a great William Gibson quote, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. I think you can see in the rise of communities like D&D, the rise of fandoms.

My friend Catherine D writes extensively about this as default friend. You can see the seeds of what grow into this new experience of reality. But as long as that business model was dominating, it's hard to see how we could have escaped that. And all of the plans that people who, like the AdBusters people, people who wanted to escape this, they had no clue what to do. They had utopian ideals, but they didn't actually have a plan to go from A, to Z because it was so difficult to imagine a world where this framework did not exist. I loved AdBusters when I was in late high school from the standpoint of how beautiful it was. And just it was interesting, but it so clearly didn't have a plan, you know?

Again, it was, but at that time, you know, protest was the point in a lot of ways. The point of counterculture wasn't necessarily to offer an alternative practically. It was to remind people that theoretically it existed. So, okay, so the internet comes along. It creates this totally different mechanism for transmitting information in which it's, you know, the gatekeepers get destroyed. And I think a lot of people are kind of familiar with the, you know, the technologically wrought breakdown of who gets to share what message. But I guess as we're watching sort of the, the, or tracking the shift from consensus reality to where we are now, what are key societal inflection points along that journey? And, you know, to what extent are they technologically mediated, i.e. the rise of social media versus.

is event mediated, such as, you know, the Iraq invasion, the global financial crisis, you know, or is it just kind of a weird belange of both? Yeah, that's a really good question, a really interesting question. You know, whenever you have this degree of a shift in media, it creates new affordances, it creates new structures, but it takes a while for those to sort of work themselves out. It's kind of inevitable, right? It's sort of like you put a crack in a piece of glass and, you know, you've lit the fuse, right? It will, even if you don't do anything else, just the change in temperature, you know, stresses and moves like that.

It will grow and spread in unpredictable ways. So that's, that's what Marshall McLuhan, the great media theorist, you know, understood as sort of the formal cause, the way that technology is the formal cause of all these other kind of social effects. I think some of the examples you listed are important instances. I mean, the Iraq War is interesting as they kind of last gasp of consensus reality. It was really the last time where the gatekeepers controlled so much of the mind space that they were able to effectively shut out alternative voices. And I don't think it's at all the coincidence that on both the left and the right, on the left with groups like when it ends up being move on, that don't worry about other places,

and on the right with magazines like American Conservative, which starts as a regular magazine but have a big online presence. they're all in response to the Iraq war, right? You, the impetus to create these alternative media spaces, which are digital first media spaces, is a response to the hegemony that was still experienced in 2003. And, I mean, I argue that, so the obvious thing that people think about is, is the distribution of the Internet. The less obvious things that people think about are the way that the Internet affords community building alongside distribution. So it's many-to-many communications. And the important thing isn't that there's no gatekeepers.

The important things that there's this immediate feedback cycle that generates strong sense of community. That's one factor. The other factor is just the power of search and the power of digital information systems. So the kind of the way that John Stewart is able to flip the television paradigm on its head by disdaining access journalism and instead relying on this archive of past television to trap people to build. and to build narratives and tell stories, that was really the first time anyone had done that to that level and with that degree of narrative structure. So a part of the point of the series is to identify, you know, yes, there's this foundational from a one to many to many communication system change, but there are also really important other changes that are going along alongside that. So I think one of the things that that brings up is the institutions of consensus reality didn't just cease to be.

they tried to adapt in some way. So let's start from the standpoint of assuming that we're kind of all on board. And I think that most people feel this way. You know, there's clearly a shift that social media comes online. There's a rise of communities. You know, we could get endlessly into, you know, the specifics there. But as that's happening, you know, you have old media establishment trying to figure it out. And this is sort of where your concept of John Stewart and into Tucker Carlson comes in.

And obviously, we're talking at an interesting moment. to the reference Tucker Carlson. You couldn't have planned it better. But in a nutshell, what's the John Stewart thesis at the heart of that article? Well, the thesis is that Stewart is the first person to, because Stewart begins from this place to critique, one of the things that struck me,

I don't know if you saw Tucker Carlson's monologue on Twitter last night, two-minute video. I encourage everyone to watch it. The only media figure in the last 20 years who could have given that exact monologue, word for word is John Stewart. Like, watch it again and imagine, you can perfectly imagine him giving the exact same monologue word for word.

And it's the same message he's had since the beginning of the Daily Show, right? Which is, you know, that the media, the news media is hurting America by focusing us on these fake debates and ignoring the issues that really matter. And so I'm going to come to you, I'm going to use my platform to bring the issues that really matter to you. But in his case, right, but tailored to the audience. You know, his audience, very youngest audience of television, most educated audience in television, richest audience in television, richest audience in television, actually in media for many of those categories, including magazines and everything else. All right.

It was ironic. It was sophisticated. It was funny. It was in on the joke. And it also developed this, it was sort of internet forward. You know, John Stewart's videos were the very first videos, news clips to ever go viral, that crossfire. Not news clips, I should say, like commentary clips to go viral that crossfire video. even before YouTube.

His channel was the first to, or his show was the first to put clips online for free at a time when people were like, why would you give away your content for free? You're losing advertising revenue. But because he knew that he was building a community of people who cared about and were interested in the show outside of people who watched cable.

And so, you know, I think everybody since John Stewart has adopted this playbook, basically, which focuses on building a community around a unified and authentic, message, taking the kind of detritus of the media world, the detritus of images, the detritus of facts, and recontextualizing them for your audience, ignoring the kind of mainstream media narratives that don't really fit with or aren't relevant to your goals as a contact creator and as a community. Everybody basically does this, and I argue in that piece of Tucker did

this better than anyone, and I'm very curious to see where he goes next. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, the other, the fictional character that could have given that speech and basically gave some number of versions of it was Will McAvoy from the newsroom, which was written by Aaron Sorkin. Absolutely. It's basically the entire premise of that show was this Tucker Carlson moment, except he stuck around to do it on network TV instead of leaving, you know, but that show was. But you couldn't do it in the network. That was the whole point, right? That was the whole point.

And, you know, so what you have now with legacy media is you have a bifurcation between media outlets, that are trying to make the old model work again, and those that are, you know, that are reestablishing themselves as subscription, on a subscription business model. And I know to your listener, maybe that doesn't sound like a big deal. Like you sold ads, not you sell subscriptions,

but the underlying incentives and what you are selling is vastly different. So, you know, the broadcast channels basically don't have a choice, and so they're having, they're, what was interesting right is they have basically stayed significantly more nonpartisan than cable channels, any cable channel, or any subscription-based channel.

I mean, PBS and NPR are interestingly enough, I would argue, should we put in the subscription camp because of where they actually get their revenues from donors. But they're on, you know, all of those ad advertising companies, advertising-based models are on the decline with the maybe exception of the Daily Mail, which is just gone wacko for scale and puts a lot of stuff on its site that no other news, you know, it's so salacious or whatever, nobody else is touching it.

They're the only one that's basically doing this successfully. BuzzFeed News obviously just closed, right? They were supposed to be the future, but they couldn't make, the numbers don't add up for running a news business on advertising anymore. And everyone else is pivoting to subscriptions. The New York Times is a self-avowed digital first, subscriber first media company now. It was not that 20 years ago. And so the implication is that when you are selling to a subscriber, the tendency is to more sort of narrowly define yourself to what that subscriber expects because you have to keep competing for them. Well, the question is, what will people pay for?

It used to be people would pay a little bit for the information in the newspaper because it was as it was the best or one of the best ways to just get information that you wanted for your life, right? whether it's the weather or the Packer scores or ads. I mean, crazy to think, but there was a time when, you know, if you wanted to buy a secondhand bicycle, your newspaper was the best place for you to find information about that for you. The Lonely Hearts column was there. Exactly. Not to mention the Lonely Hearts column, right?

So they pay a little bit. Now, they aren't going to pay a lot for that service, but you don't need them to because you can sell their interest as eyeballs to advertisers. Now, all that stuff, we just talked about, there's far better ways of getting that information from the internet. So you can't sell, even on the internet, you can't sell information outside of very particular context. So what you sell inside is interpretation, because you're so deluged by all of the possible sources

of information that you want to feel like you understand the world. And so now the business of news organizations is news commentary, news opinion, or news analysis is sometimes called. It's absolutely exploded as a category. And the reason is that's what they're selling. and that's what people are paying for. And the incentives are different for that. So for advertising, you know, you just print what you have, right?

It doesn't actually matter. Nobody opens their newspaper and is like, I can't wait to follow up a next story, right? But when you're selling subscriptions, you want to keep people hooked. And you keep them hooked with ongoing narratives and stories. And so you take the raw material of events and people and things happening in the world and you turn them into stories and narratives to make them insensible to your audience. right you know there's also little things like advertisers all else equal they actually um they they like positive stories people in a good mood buy more and more interested to do stuff they're not

they're not just going to stay home um subscribers are you keep more subscribers with fear-based or anxiety based stories because our responses humans to anxiety is I want to know more I want to get more information and so there's this feedback loop there the Andre mirror writes a lot about post-journalism and I recommend his work to anyone who wants to do kind of explore some of these subtle shifts more. So where does this all leave us today, right? So, and maybe a way to come at this might be, where does it leave us, especially relative to the way that it is described popularly, because there's a narrative of hyper fragmentation,

hyperpartisanship, no one can agree on anything, everyone hates everyone else. That's sort of the way that I think most people would describe the sort of post-consensus reality era. Excuse me, not most people. Most times that it's mentioned kind of have that frame or lens. What is, you know, how much does that actually describe it? And what are the other ways to look at it and how does it function right now or how is it coming to function? Yeah, that's interesting. I think there's more going on beneath the surface meets the eye.

So, for instance, yes, hyperpartisanship is a problem. But there's also now vast constituencies and communities within each of the parties that have their own sort of media ecosystem. And so it's actually creating both more political diversity, but also some interesting places for unexpected crossovers, so to speak. Right. I mean, I think, you know, Matt Stoller, who writes the, I think he's called Big. It's a substack. He's an antitrust kind of activist, right? He started off from the left. He found a huge audience on the right.

It's almost becoming a problem for him, actually, how interested if people are in the right are about what he's saying. But politically, I don't think he's changed, he still has many of his sort of left-to-center bona fides. The Yimbi movement, right, which is sort of left-coded, has a lot of fans on the right. So there are some interesting kind of crossover events that are now possible because of the independence offered by these different communities. And I also think we're very early. Frankly, I think that, you know, we kind of got things going with the bang with the Trump era. I think the Trump era provided a window of opportunity for many of these media institutions to firmly reestablish themselves on a subscriber-based model. That's certainly true for CNN and Washington Post and arguably the New York Times.

So it was a kind of evolutionary moment. But the future of politics might not be quite as high energy as it is now. There used to be a time when politics was boring, and it was boring in part because politics in media was pretty boring, right? And then we reached this sort of fever pitch in the 90s and 2000s where politics is like an immensely interesting part of the media landscape. And one possible equilibrium is actually that politics itself gets outcompeted by video games, sports, especially sports betting, all kinds of other things that could hold your interest.

So, you know, I'm much more bullish, I think, at where this is going than your average sort of media commentator. So it's interesting. I was thinking about it. I've been thinking about this for a few weeks since, like I said, since I heard you on Hidden Forces. I was thinking about the areas in which we've also noticed or recognized consensus reality being gone, right? One of the ways you put about it, I thought was great was when there's no dominant monoculture, there's no counterculture. I think if you look at music is a great example of there isn't a sort of a like alternative doesn't actually mean alternative. It's just its own category that comes with a set of assumptions. And I don't know that there's anyone who would argue that the incredible proliferation of the diversity of music that's available, you know, embodied in Spotify playlist that range, you know,

like when I go on Spotify, it's like, do you want to listen to classical hyperpop, bass arcade? You know, it's like it's huge. No one would argue that that's bad. that's worse, right? It's clearly self-evidently much better. I think TV movies, you know, there are certainly new, you know, film purists, let's call them, who are lament the fact that they can't make sort of, you know, mid-budget adult dramas anymore, but like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have said they're going to do that. And I think that broadly speaking, the proliferation of TV as as a medium to do sort of motion pictures has totally transformed and improved how much

people can do. So you have all these areas of culture, entertainment, where the expansion of and, you know, nicheifying of these sort of, you know, diverse interests is clearly better. It feels like the area that is the challenge for people is around politics. And I wonder to what extent that's because two things. One, ultimately, the game of politics is coming to some consensus, even if it's a consensus that everyone doesn't love, but it is the most inherently at tension with things that destroy consensus. And two, how much the media that used to be in charge of driving us towards consensus laments their lack of ability to drive that consensus or to have that consensus anymore.

But I know, I'm just interested in your take on all that. Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, I think two questions about the feature of politics. One, and I was just on. breaking points with Marshall Kalslov was interviewed me for breaking points yesterday, and he posited, I don't know if it's on in the segment or after the segment, you know, that we had not yet seen an actual political movement, which necessarily encompasses larger than any one of these communities.

We had not yet seen an actual political movement emerge out of this sort of post-consensus space. Now, we might yet see that, but we don't yet know what kind of coordinated action amongst reality communities looks like yet. And maybe the best example we have is like the January 6th incident, which is probably not a good, you know, you had the Q community with the, you know, like the Manosphere types with a bunch of Fox News people, like everybody's mixed in together, you know. I don't know if that's a good future for us.

So that's one thing. The second thing would be what I argue in my piece which just debuted in the New Atlantis on what was the fact was, you know, one element of this is that reality. Reality was never globalized prior to this era of consensus reality, but it was localized, right? So now, but now we have delocalized, you know, realities. So these realities are localized on the Internet, not in the real world. But politics, our political structures, are rooted in geography, in the United States at least. And so one of the things, so I think this kind of, you know, this intersection of where people live versus the communities they're part of.

I think this is a source of tension. Not coincidentally, you know, for the first time in American history, really, you're seeing people move based on their political ideology. People are moving towns, are moving states within the United States based on their political ideology. This is really happening. And so you might see a feedback loop here where we actually do kind of geographically sort in part based on these reality allegiances. There's a great quote from the most recent book, or the most recent. article rather, if the temptation of the age of facts was to believe that the only things one could know were those that procedural reason or science validated, the temptation of the age of data is to believe that any coherent narrative path that can be charted through the data has a claim to truth, that alternative facts permit alternative realities. I guess the extent is, or the question is, not that you necessarily have an answer to this, but how much does navigating this new multi-reality space involve respecting alternative? alternative realities as legitimate versus constantly competing.

Because it's very clear that we're in a paradigm of not sort of accepting other people's realities as legitimate, but just competing to have whatever set of realities we subscribe to be the dominant realities, even if that's no longer a paradigm that's possible anymore. Yeah, that's a great and really important question. And we're still sorting this out. And to some extent, this isn't the first time this has happened, right? You see a similar – what you see after the printing press is divergence over metaphysical reality, in this case over sort of theological and philosophical claims, metaphysical claims. And the initial response was to – for people in those different communities to try to assert the dominance of their community, you know, first through argumentation, but then eventually through violence, right?

So we're going to be a Protestant country. We're going to be a Catholic country. We're going to persecute people who disagree with us, right? And it took a long time to develop institutions that permitted divergence on those metaphysical realities. And I think there's this, you know, this assumption that that was sort of silly that maybe you didn't need to take it so seriously. I think that's wrong. I think if you look at the social institutions of Europe at that time, they were very rooted in shared metaphysical and religious assumptions. And it was not, but you use the kind of obvious case, right, which is not hypothetical.

This really happened, right? If you have a court system that's based on people believing having the same notion of God and morality and the reality of condemnation in hell, and you expect them to take an oath and swear on that religious basis that you'll tell the truth, what is the meaning for your society for our people to have people who don't no longer share maybe some of those assumptions, right? That's just one concrete example. Like, can you trust your court system anymore? There are lots of examples like that. So it took developing a new institutional framework to take the temperature down on some of these differences. And so I think that is where we will be going. This is one of the things that I'm excited about about crypto, frankly, is that there are a lot of use cases where if we can embed, I'm not like a total like biology, like, well, just the oracles will sort everything out.

I think at the level of our assumptions about reality, there will still be huge divergence. But I think there will be cases, whether it's financial or related to voting, where if we can agree on mathematical procedures and protocols, we can bracket some of these, and we can abet those protocols and institutions, we can bracket some of these reality divergences. But I think it's going to be a long process of sorting this out institutionally and socially. So maybe just to sum that up because I think it's super important. And my guess is that this will kind of be where we maybe pick up in the next conversation is the starting point. One, the institutions, whatever they look like, however network they are versus, you know, traditional they are of the post-consensus reality world have not yet been formed even if we're starting to see glimmers of them. That's part one. Part two are just sort of, you know, relatedly but different. I do think it's interesting.

this idea of within the crypto community, there's a sense of, you know, Bitcoin in particular. We can't agree on everything, but we can agree on the rules by which this ledger runs, you know, the sort of math that mandates this, that this is a sort of like, you know, regardless of the radical expanse of political philosophies of people who like Bitcoin, they agree on how the next block is getting produced, you know, by and large. And that sort of, you know, that does become a foundational connection point that, especially when it's something that's so important as who owns what, which is sort of what the Bitcoin ledger is dictating, it does create a lot more space to be comfortable with diversity of perspectives otherwise. At least, you know,

that doesn't mean that there aren't Bitcoiners who feel the exact opposite of that. But I think for a lot of us, that's absolutely the case. Yeah, that's exactly right. And, you know, this is how it worked that last time, right? Liberalism, among other things, is a, is about procedures, right? We're going to bracket metaphysical theological questions. We're going to grant certain procedures to follow, but they were still social procedures. And the part of the problem now is that we no longer trust, not only do we no longer trust our, you know, fellow man to follow those procedures, we also have media ecosystems that can amplify true and fake reporting on violations of those procedures. So there's a huge amplification on violations of procedure and therefore a huge loss

of trust in procedure. I think the, you know, the kind of reporting around, particularly kind of right-wing reality communities around the last election is a great example of this, right? And so the allure of something like crypto is you can agree on the procedures ahead of time. You can abed them in a cybernetic system, which is not only difficult to modify, but is also highly auditable and automatically auditable. And perhaps this. can be a path back to certain kinds of trust between these reality communities. And then on top of that, we get to the AI era, which I'm sure is going to be a part of this conversation as well.

Absolutely. All right, John. Well, listen, I know you've got to run for now. This is an awesome start for this conversation. I'm so excited that you're doing this work. And like I said, we'll definitely have another one, you know, when we can to keep building on this. But thank you for taking the time today.

Thanks for having me on the breakdown. One of the things that I find so interesting and somewhat challenging about this conversation is that it's very hard not to look at something that was so assumed in the past, this idea that there was a common set of shared beliefs that undergirded society, and not see its change as having lost something as an inherently bad thing. Certainly we see the fracturous, difficult parts of this change every day. Our political discourse is divided, our trust in institutions is basically gone, and we seem to want to compete constantly for whose view of the world is the right one.

It's possible, however, that the turmoil that we're experiencing is just the transition, and that, as John pointed out, there might be new, better institutions that are well suited to diversities of opinions that just haven't been built yet. I don't know if that's the case, but I think it's an optimistic view, and certainly seems more interesting to explore than yet another condemnation of how much it sucks that we've got such partisan politics. I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm very much looking forward to the next one. And in the meantime, let me know what you think.

This is definitely the type of thing that we should be talking about on the Breakers Discord. So if you're not in there yet, come join us, bit.ly slash breakdown pod. That's going to do it for today. I hope you're having a great weekend. Until next time, guys, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.