In a world where everyone’s asking who can you trust, there’s only one answer: the trustworthy. From el gato malo at boriquagato.substack.com:
i have spoken a great deal about the impending reputation economy where mere “information” becomes insufficient or outright harmful amidst the tumult and tinsel of modern media in the age of AI and aggregation algos.
the new gold shall become one’s demonstrated bone fides.
and not everyone likes this. because reputation must be earned and sustained and you cannot do this by lying all the time.
such a trend poses grave threat to the manner in which many have done things. do not expect them to go quietly.
even among the discerning, there are nasty tricks that can be played and the discovery and weaponization of these cognitive hacks is coming. fields like behavioral economics that have long studied such subjects have devolved many keen and effective insights into how to “nudge” humans by preying upon their inconsistent, inaccurate, or inherently biased thought processes.
some early pioneers recently won a nobel in economics for it.
corporations have been using it for decades.
but when you put this in the hands of government capable of wielding coercive power, you enter into a new, more dangerous area and nudges rapidly become shoves and psyops.
